From the Grinding Stone to the Laboratory: How Herbs and Spices Became Science

In a feature published by Jagonews24 in June 2026, Bibi Shahijan, a former teacher from the Oxygen area of Chattogram, traced how the herbs and spices once ground by hand in Bengali kitchens have become subjects of scientific study, a growing market and an economic opportunity for Bangladesh. Her piece moves from the sound of a mother grinding spices on the shil-pata to the research laboratory, and closes with a warning about adulterated spices and about treating illness with herbs without a doctor's advice. This report sets out her argument and places it beside what health authorities, researchers and official figures had published by that date.

Shahijan begins in the kitchen. The rhythm of a mother grinding spices on the shil-pata, the flat grinding stone with its hand-held roller, was once a familiar part of Bengali life, she writes, and the house would fill with the smell of ginger, garlic, turmeric, cumin and coriander. Few people then imagined, in her words, that these ordinary cooking ingredients would one day draw the interest of scientists. Today, she argues, herbs and spices are not only flavourings but part of health, the economy, culture and research.

She describes the remedies that were common in rural Bengal before modern medicine spread: the juice of ginger and tulsi (holy basil) leaves for colds and coughs, cumin for stomach trouble, cloves for a sore throat and turmeric on wounds. These were people's first resort, she writes, and many families still keep the habit. She also notes that South Asia's Ayurvedic tradition has used turmeric, tulsi, ginger, cinnamon and black cumin for centuries. These are her account of household tradition; as the sections below show, the health authorities that have reviewed the evidence describe most such uses as unproven, and the writer herself states that no herb or spice should replace a doctor's treatment.

Her piece also points to the trade history of spices, to research on compounds such as curcumin in turmeric, allicin in garlic and gingerol in ginger, to a rising market for herbal teas, spice drinks and herbal products, and to Bangladesh's own production of turmeric, chilli, coriander, ginger and garlic. She ends on a caution: adulterated spices, unsafe processing and weak quality control put consumers at risk, so safe production, proper storage and quality marketing must come first, and folk knowledge has to be joined with scientific research.

Shahijan reminds readers that pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were once among the most valuable goods in the world and that European sailors made long voyages in search of them. The history of the spice trade bears this out. Ancient Egyptians traded in spices with the Land of Punt, in the Horn of Africa region, in the third millennium BC. Austronesian seafarers carried cloves and nutmeg from the Maluku Islands, in today's Indonesia, along routes that reached South India and Sri Lanka between about 1500 and 600 BC. By the first century AD, Tamil texts describe Greek traders buying large sacks of black pepper from India.

From the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab merchants from Yemen and Oman dominated the sea routes of the Indian Ocean, and for centuries the Italian maritime republics, above all Venice and Genoa, controlled Europe's share of the trade through the Middle East. The search for a direct sea route to the source of spices drove the Portuguese voyages of the late fifteenth century. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on India's Malabar Coast in 1498. Afonso de Albuquerque took Malacca for Portugal in 1511, and early in 1512 an expedition under António de Abreu became the first Europeans to reach the Banda Islands, a source of nutmeg. The Bay of Bengal was part of this network of exchange. The spice trade, as Shahijan says, helped shape the world economy and the expansion of colonial power.

The writer's central idea, that knowledge from traditional remedies can feed modern science, has well-known examples. The World Health Organization (WHO) lists aspirin and the antimalarial drug artemisinin among the landmark medicines that have their origins in traditional medicine.

Artemisinin is the clearest case. In the late 1960s, the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou was appointed to head a research group in Project 523, a secret Chinese programme launched in May 1967 to find new treatments for malaria. Searching old medical texts, her team was drawn to sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) and to a passage written by the physician Ge Hong around 340 CE, which described soaking a handful of the herb in water and drinking the juice. Tu found that extraction at a low temperature, instead of the traditional hot-water method, preserved the active substance, and in 1972 she and her colleagues isolated the pure compound, artemisinin. In 2015 she received half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria, sharing the prize with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura.

The lesson of artemisinin also runs the other way. The useful medicine came from isolating, testing and standardising one compound through years of research, not from the household remedy itself. That is the gap between tradition and evidence that the following sections describe.

Shahijan writes that universities and research institutes around the world are studying curcumin, allicin, gingerol and the active compounds of cinnamon. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), part of the United States National Institutes of Health, reviews this research in fact sheets that were current in mid-2026, and its conclusions are more cautious than the popular image of these spices.

Turmeric is a plant of the ginger family grown commercially in India and Southeast Asia; its underground stem, the rhizome, is used in cooking, and the compound curcumin gives it its yellow colour. NCCIH notes that turmeric has been used in Ayurvedic, Chinese, Islamic and Thai medicine for indigestion, colds, skin infections, arthritis and liver disease. Its April 2025 summary says many studies have looked at turmeric or curcumin for fatty liver disease, osteoarthritis and high cholesterol, but that not enough is known to conclude that it is beneficial for any health purpose. There is some initial positive evidence that oral curcumin can ease the pain and stiffness of knee osteoarthritis, though better studies are needed. A 2017 review in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by Nelson and colleagues was more sceptical still: it noted that curcumin makes up only up to about five percent of turmeric, that more than 120 clinical trials had tested curcuminoids, and that no double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial of curcumin had succeeded. The authors described curcumin as an unstable, reactive compound that the body absorbs poorly.

For garlic, NCCIH's February 2025 summary says supplements may modestly lower total and LDL cholesterol in people with high cholesterol and may slightly lower blood pressure in people with hypertension, while the evidence that garlic prevents stomach cancer or helps the immune system is weak. For ginger, the same body says it may help with the nausea and vomiting of pregnancy and might reduce the severity of menstrual cramps, while its value for motion sickness and for nausea after chemotherapy or surgery is uncertain.

Cinnamon comes from the dried bark of Cinnamomum trees. NCCIH distinguishes Ceylon cinnamon, the "true" cinnamon of Sri Lanka, from cassia cinnamon grown in southeastern Asia, and its November 2024 summary says current evidence does not clearly support cinnamon for any health condition, including diabetes and weight loss. Science, in other words, has studied these spices closely, and in most cases the honest answer as of 2026 was that benefits were possible, modest or unproven.

Shahijan's warning that herbs should not replace a doctor's treatment matches the position of health authorities. NCCIH stresses that "natural" does not always mean safe: some plant products harm the liver, some reduce the effect of prescription medicines, and some supplements have been found to contain undeclared drugs or ingredients. It advises people to tell their health care providers about any herbs or supplements they use.

The spice fact sheets give concrete examples. Conventionally prepared turmeric or curcumin taken by mouth is likely safe in the recommended amounts for two to three months, NCCIH says, but liver damage has been reported in some people who took formulations designed to make curcumin easier to absorb, and turmeric supplements are not advised in pregnancy. Garlic supplements may increase the risk of bleeding, which matters for anyone taking blood thinners or aspirin or preparing for surgery, and fresh raw garlic placed on the skin can cause severe irritation and chemical burns. Ginger can cause abdominal discomfort, heartburn and diarrhoea, and people taking medicines are advised to speak to a provider before using it. Cassia cinnamon can contain coumarin, a chemical linked to liver problems, while Ceylon cinnamon contains only traces of it. Spices in ordinary cooking amounts are a different matter from concentrated supplements.

Anyone with a health problem, anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding, and anyone taking regular medicine should see a doctor before using herbs or spice supplements as treatment.

The rise of herbal medicine that Shahijan describes is also visible in global health policy. In 2022 the WHO set up its Global Traditional Medicine Centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India, with support from the Government of India, as a hub for research and evidence on traditional medicine. The WHO notes that around 90 percent of its member states have reported on the use of traditional medicine, and that traditional, complementary and integrative medicine is used by billions of people yet receives less than one percent of global health research funding.

In May 2025 the Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly in Geneva approved the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025-2034, which the assembly had requested in 2023. An article by WHO staff in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in November 2025 set out its four objectives: to strengthen the evidence base, to ensure safety and quality through risk-based regulation, to integrate safe and effective practices into health systems and primary care, and to build partnerships that protect traditional knowledge and share its benefits.

The same article shows how fast national policy had moved. In 2023, 90 of the 106 member states that responded to a WHO survey reported having a national policy on traditional, complementary and integrative medicine, against 25 countries in 1999, and 116 member states reported regulatory frameworks for herbal medicines, against 65 in 1999. Yet 101 of the 106 responding countries, 95 percent, named a lack of research data as a key barrier. That gap between wide use and thin evidence is exactly where Shahijan's call to join folk knowledge with scientific research applies.

Shahijan sees herbs and spices as an economic opportunity for Bangladesh, which grows turmeric, chilli, coriander, ginger, garlic and other spices. Figures presented at a programme in February 2023 and reported by The Daily Star give the scale. According to Shailendra Nath Mozumder, then a principal scientific officer at the Spices Research Centre, the country produced 49.30 lakh tonnes of spices a year against an annual demand of 58.50 lakh tonnes, so about 9.20 lakh tonnes, roughly 15 percent of demand, had to be imported. Of about 50 kinds of spices used in Bangladesh, 30 were grown locally. His presentation said that between 2000 and 2021 the area under spices had risen 1.7 times, yields 5.4 times and production 9.1 times.

The Spices Research Centre, under the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), was set up in the mid-1990s at Shibganj in Bogura district. A 2016 Daily Star report described it as working on 70 acres, with regional centres at Magura, Cumilla and Joydebpur and sub-regional stations at Lalmonirhat, Faridpur, Khagrachhari and Jaintapur. By February 2023, according to the centre and BARI, it had developed 51 high-yielding spice varieties and 156 production technologies. At the same programme, agriculture ministry secretary Wahida Akter said a project titled "Improved varieties of spices and technology expansion" aimed to raise production by five percent and reduce imports by spreading these varieties more widely.

Beyond kitchen spices, Shahijan sees potential in the cultivation and processing of medicinal plants. A 2022 review in Frontiers in Pharmacology by Most. Afia Akhtar noted that of the many medicinal plants growing across Bangladesh, about 1,000 are conservatively considered to have therapeutic use by traditional healers, and that the country's Ayurvedic, Unani and homeopathic formulations draw on these resources.

The industry built on these plants is sizeable but small in export terms. Writing in The Daily Star in December 2025, Dr Tareq Salahuddin counted 201 Ayurvedic, 275 Unani and 40 herbal manufacturers in the formal traditional medicine sector, and cited a World Bank-supported study that put the formal herbal medicine market, including homeopathy, at about Tk 3,300 million, roughly US$60 million. He noted that exports of medicinal plants as raw material were only US$0.59 million in 2013-14 and US$0.39 million in 2014-15, and argued that regulation split across several agencies held the sector back.

The best-known example of medicinal plant farming is in Natore. A July 2023 Mongabay report by Mohammad Al-Masum Molla described Laxmipur Kholabaria union, a cluster of 15 villages known as the Oushudhi Gram, or village of herbal medicines. The movement began in 1995 when a local kabiraj, Afaz Uddin Pagla, started growing medicinal plants on his own land, and the report said more than 1,300 farmers had been growing them for two decades, with about 140 species on about 140 hectares. Aloe vera, ashwagandha, kalmegh, tulsi, shatamul and basak were among the crops, plants worth Tk 250-300 million were sold from the villages each year, and buyers included Square Pharmaceuticals, ACME, Hamdard and Taiwan Food Processing Industries.

Shahijan's warning about adulterated spices has a documented Bangladeshi example. Research led by Jenna Forsyth and Steve Luby of Stanford University, working with the Dhaka-based research institute icddr,b, found that some turmeric processors were adding lead chromate, an industrial yellow pigment commonly used to colour toys and furniture, to make turmeric brighter and more saleable. Studies published in 2019 in Environmental Research and Environmental Science and Technology linked contaminated turmeric to raised blood-lead levels in Bangladesh.

The response followed between 2017 and 2021: the findings were spread through news media, traders and consumers were warned through public notices and meetings, and the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority used a rapid lead-testing technology to enforce the rule against adulteration. Stanford reported in May 2024 that the share of lead-contaminated turmeric samples in Bangladeshi markets had fallen from 47 percent to zero, and that blood lead levels among turmeric-mill workers had dropped by 30 percent.

The stakes are high. The WHO states that there is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects, and that lead can permanently affect children's brain development, reducing intelligence and attention. The turmeric case shows why Shahijan places safe processing and quality control alongside research in her vision for the sector.

Photo: ROCKY / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (feature by Bibi Shahijan, June 2026), US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (turmeric, garlic, ginger, cinnamon and dietary supplement fact sheets), Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (Nelson et al., 2017), World Health Organization (Global Traditional Medicine Centre; lead poisoning fact sheet), Bulletin of the World Health Organization (November 2025), The Daily Star (31 July 2016, 9 February 2023, 14 December 2025), Frontiers in Pharmacology (2022), Mongabay (21 July 2023), Stanford University (King Center for Global Development; Stanford Global Health, 2 May 2024), Wikipedia (Spice trade; Tu Youyou)