Cloves Have 62x the Antioxidants of Blueberries — And That’s Not Even the Strangest Fact About Them
By one lab measure, cloves are the single most antioxidant-dense food ever tested. They also contain the same active ingredient your dentist uses before drilling. Almost none of this is on the spice jar.
What’s an ORAC unit? ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity — a lab test that measures how well a food can “soak up” unstable molecules called free radicals, which are linked to cell damage and ageing. Think of it like a sponge-absorbency test, but for antioxidants instead of water. It’s measured in a test tube, not in a person, so a high score tells you a food is antioxidant-dense — it does not by itself tell you what that does inside your body. Cloves score higher on this test than any other food measured so far.
Five Facts That Reframe an Ordinary Spice
- Cloves score 290,283 ORAC units (a lab measure of antioxidant strength) per 100g — about 62x blueberries (4,669) and more than double turmeric (127,068). The highest of any food ever measured.
- Eugenol — 70–90% of clove essential oil — is the active ingredient in Zinc Oxide Eugenol (ZOE), a real dental material used today for temporary fillings and topical anaesthesia before drilling.
- Eugenol inhibits COX-2 (an enzyme that drives inflammation), the same one targeted by ibuprofen and celecoxib, through a different mechanism than NSAIDs use.
- Cloves grew in exactly one place on Earth — the Maluku Islands of Indonesia — until the 18th century, and three empires fought over that monopoly for 300 years.
- Han Dynasty court officials (207 BCE) were required to hold cloves in their mouths before addressing the Emperor, for fresh breath — one of the oldest recorded uses of the plant.
Five Things That Reframe Cloves
The eugenol in your rendang is the same molecule your dentist applies before injecting anaesthetic.
Zinc oxide eugenol (ZOE) is used in dental practice as a temporary cavity-filling material and topical anaesthetic-antiseptic. The eugenol in ZOE is extracted from clove oil. When you place a clove bud on an aching tooth, you are applying the same pharmaceutical active ingredient your dentist uses, through the same neurological mechanism.
Cloves have the highest antioxidant score of any food ever measured — not among spices, among all foods.
The ORAC (antioxidant lab score) score reflects eugenol, acetyl eugenol, gallic acid, kaempferol, quercetin, and oleanolic acid concentration. Half a teaspoon of clove delivers an antioxidant load that would take many cups of blueberries to approach. This does not mean cloves cure oxidative-stress disease — the lab score doesn’t translate directly into clinical outcomes — but the compound density is in a different order of magnitude from other foods.
Eugenol inhibits COX-2 — the same enzyme as ibuprofen and celecoxib — without the gastric damage NSAIDs cause.
NSAIDs like ibuprofen inhibit both COX-1 and COX-2. COX-1 inhibition is what damages the stomach lining. Celecoxib was developed to selectively target COX-2 and spare COX-1. Eugenol’s anti-inflammatory action follows a comparable selective pattern, which is part of why clove has a long history as a stomach-safe anti-inflammatory in traditional use.
The toothache relief isn’t folklore — it’s TRPV1 (a nerve receptor for pain and heat) modulation and sodium channel inhibition.
Eugenol acts on TRPV1 receptors (the same pain/heat receptor capsaicin activates) and inhibits voltage-gated sodium channels in nerve fibres — a mechanism that overlaps with how local anaesthetics work. The numbing sensation from biting a clove is a real, named pharmacological event, not a placebo response.
Eugenol shows documented antihistamine activity — the mechanism behind a very old petua.
Eugenol inhibits mast cell degranulation (the release of histamine, the chemical behind sneezing and itching) and histamine release. This gives a real pharmacological basis to cloves’ traditional use for allergic rhinitis and morning sneezing — a claim we treat in full further down this article.
What the Compound Actually Does
Highest of any food tested. 62x blueberries, more than double turmeric.
The dominant compound responsible for nearly every documented pharmacological action.
Same inflammatory target as ibuprofen and celecoxib, different gastric risk profile.
Mast cell stabilisation gives mechanistic basis for traditional use in allergic rhinitis, including chronic morning sneezing.
Broad antimicrobial activity through the same membrane-disruption mechanism documented across other plants in this collection.
Cloves and Cinnamon Tea for Morning Sneezing
This is one of the most-asked-about petua we’ve received: a tea of cloves and cinnamon, taken to stop chronic morning sneezing and a runny nose that many Malaysians experience on waking.
What the mechanism actually supports
Eugenol has documented antihistamine activity through mast cell stabilisation — meaning it can reduce the histamine release that drives allergic-type sneezing and congestion. Cinnamaldehyde, the main active compound in cinnamon, adds a separate, complementary anti-inflammatory action. The mechanism is real and named. What doesn’t exist is a clinical trial testing this specific tea, at this dose, for this specific condition (which is very often allergic rhinitis rather than a cold).
Verdict: Partial Basis. Plausible mechanism, supported by component-level pharmacology. Not validated by a direct clinical trial. Worth trying as a low-risk addition to your morning routine — not a substitute for seeing a doctor if the sneezing is severe, persistent, or accompanied by other symptoms, since chronic morning rhinitis can also indicate dust mite allergy, sinus issues, or non-allergic rhinitis that need separate management.
The Spice That Started Wars
Cloves grew in exactly one place on Earth until the 18th century: the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia — specifically Ternate, Tidore, and Bacan. For most of recorded history, if you wanted cloves, they came from there or nowhere.
That scarcity made cloves one of the most valuable trade goods on the planet. Clove residue has been found in a sealed vessel in Syria dating to around 1800 BCE — physical evidence that cloves were being traded from Indonesia to the Middle East nearly 4,000 years ago, centuries before any written record of the spice trade.
By the Han Dynasty in China (starting 207 BCE), court officials were required to hold cloves in their mouths before addressing the Emperor — an early, deliberate use of the spice’s aromatic and antimicrobial properties for fresh breath, recorded in official court practice.
In the 11th century, the physician Ibn Sina documented cloves in the Canon of Medicine for tooth pain and stomach conditions — a formal medical text describing uses that modern pharmacology later explained mechanistically.
Three Empires, One Monopoly
When European powers reached Southeast Asia, control of the Maluku Islands — the only source of cloves on Earth — became a strategic prize worth fighting for. Portugal arrived first. The Dutch East India Company (VOC (a Dutch trading company that acted almost like a private government)) then seized and enforced a brutal monopoly, destroying clove trees outside their controlled territory and restricting cultivation to a single island to control global supply and price. England contested Dutch control for decades. Together, these powers fought over the Maluku Islands for roughly three centuries.
The monopoly only broke when clove seedlings were smuggled out of the Maluku Islands to Zanzibar, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, Zanzibar and Madagascar are among the world’s largest clove producers — their entire industries descended from smuggled plant material that broke a 300-year monopoly.
Eugenol itself was first isolated and chemically characterised in 1842. The compound did not become medicine when chemists finally named it — it had already been carried across oceans, fought over by empires, and held in the mouths of emperors’ courtiers for thousands of years. The chemistry simply caught up to what the trade routes already knew.
Cloves also found their way into a very different form of use across the region: kretek (a hand-rolled clove cigarette), invented in Kudus, Java in the late 19th century by Haji Jamhari, who mixed ground cloves into tobacco — reportedly to ease his own asthma. The name comes from the crackling sound burning cloves make. Kretek spread widely across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the wider region, and remains a significant part of daily life for many, especially older generations along the coasts and in rural communities.
A Field Observation Worth Wondering About
On the East Coast, among fishermen in their sixties and seventies who have spent a lifetime free-diving and working nets by hand, a specific smoking habit shows up again and again: rokok daun (hand-rolled cigarettes) — nipah (a palm whose leaf is used as rolling paper) leaf, tembakau Jawa, and cloves, rolled by hand. Kretek, the factory-made version, appears only sometimes; the self-rolled version is the daily habit.
These are men who can hold their breath underwater three to four times longer than an average person their age — or any age. And they’ve been doing this, smoking this, for decades.
It’s an odd thing to sit with. Everything in the tobacco literature says lung function should be the first casualty of a lifetime of smoke. And yet here are men whose lungs, by the most demanding measure there is — holding still, underwater, on one breath — are performing far beyond average.
Is it the clove and tobacco blend itself, doing something the modern literature hasn’t looked at closely enough? Is it decades of freediving training a lung capacity so large that even heavy smoking can’t erode it back to the average? Is it survivorship — the men who couldn’t take it left the trade, or worse, and the ones still standing at 70 are the ones whose bodies could always take punishment? Is it something in the fish-heavy diet, the sea air, the physical labour, stacking up in the other direction the same way it seems to in Japan?
We don’t have an answer. We’re not sure anyone does. But it’s the kind of thing that should make you pause before assuming any single factor — good or bad — writes the whole story of a person’s health.
There’s a principle we return to often on this site: the body becomes what it is consistently asked to be. Challenge it — a hill, a cold morning, a lifetime of holding your breath underwater — and it adapts, and grows stronger for having been asked. Remove the challenge, and it quietly stands down.
It’s tempting to wonder if that’s what’s happening here — decades of apnea training a respiratory and cardiovascular system so resilient that it simply absorbs what would flatten someone less conditioned. It’s a fair question.
But the same principle that explains why a body gets stronger from a hill climb also comes with a caveat: the adaptation only works within a range. Enough challenge to provoke growth, not so much it overwhelms repair. A bitter root, a cold swim, a hard climb — these have a floor where small amounts help. Whether smoke inhaled for fifty years has that same floor, no matter how strong the lungs around it, is a different question — one we don’t think anyone has a clean answer to yet.
We don’t know which of these is true for the men on that coast. Maybe both are, in different proportions. It’s the kind of observation that’s more honest left as a question than forced into an answer.
Busting the Overclaims and the Dismissals
“Clove oil can replace dental anaesthetic for any tooth pain.”
BustedEugenol has genuine, documented analgesic activity via TRPV1 and sodium channel mechanisms — but it is not equivalent in strength or duration to injected local anaesthetics used in clinical dentistry, and it does nothing for the underlying cause of a cavity or infection. Useful for temporary relief; not a substitute for treatment.
“Cloves are just a flavouring spice with no real medicinal value.”
BustedThis underclaims it. Eugenol is a pharmacologically active compound with documented COX-2 inhibition, antihistamine, antimicrobial, and analgesic activity — active enough to be formulated into an actual dental product used in clinics today.
“Higher ORAC score means cloves are a cure for inflammation-related disease.”
PartialThe ORAC number is real and reflects a genuinely high antioxidant compound concentration. But it’s a lab assay measuring free-radical scavenging in a test tube — it has not been shown to reliably predict clinical outcomes in the body. High ORAC is meaningful, not curative.
“Clove tea can help clear allergic morning sneezing.”
PartialMechanistically plausible via mast cell stabilisation and antihistamine activity, and safe to try as a dietary addition. No direct clinical trial has tested this specific preparation for this specific condition, so it should complement, not replace, medical evaluation for persistent symptoms.
“Clove oil is completely safe because it’s natural.”
BustedUndiluted clove oil is caustic and can cause chemical burns on skin and mucous membranes, and concentrated ingestion has caused liver toxicity, particularly in young children. Eugenol is a potent, concentrated compound — “natural” does not mean risk-free at high doses.
“Cloves have documented antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity that is scientifically real.”
ConfirmedThis is well-supported across the pharmacological literature: eugenol’s antimicrobial action via membrane disruption and its COX-2-linked anti-inflammatory activity are consistently documented mechanisms, not folk exaggeration.
Preparation Methods
Whole clove for toothache
Place one whole clove bud (or a drop of diluted clove oil on a cotton swab) against the aching tooth or gum. Temporary relief only — see a dentist for the underlying cause.
Clove and cinnamon tea
2–3 whole cloves and one cinnamon stick simmered in water for 8–10 minutes. Traditional preparation for morning sneezing and general warmth; drink once daily.
Ground clove in cooking
A pinch in curries, rendang, and spiced rice — the traditional culinary dose, well within safe daily intake and part of the reason clove has been a kitchen staple for millennia.
Clove oil — external use only
Always dilute in a carrier oil before any skin contact. Never apply undiluted. Never ingest essential oil directly.
Honest Limitations
- Most human clinical data on eugenol exists in dental and topical contexts — systemic disease-prevention claims rest more heavily on cell and animal studies.
- Undiluted clove oil is genuinely dangerous in concentrated or ingested form, especially for children.
- ORAC score does not equal clinical benefit — it measures a lab assay, not a health outcome.
- The morning-sneezing petua has a real mechanism but no dedicated clinical trial behind this specific use.
Questions Worth Asking Your Doctor or Dentist
- Is clove oil safe to use alongside my current medications, particularly blood thinners?
- My morning sneezing has been going on for months — could this be allergic rhinitis rather than something clove tea can address?
- Is the tooth pain I’m using clove for a sign of something that needs treatment, not just symptom relief?
References & Further Reading
- USDA ORAC database, antioxidant capacity values for spices.
- Studies on eugenol pharmacology: COX-2 inhibition, TRPV1 modulation, sodium channel activity.
- Zinc Oxide Eugenol dental cement — clinical dentistry literature.
- Historical trade records: Maluku spice trade, VOC monopoly, 18th–19th century clove smuggling to Zanzibar and Madagascar.
- Ibn Sina, Canon of Medicine (11th century).
- Studies on eugenol antihistamine / mast cell stabilisation activity.