Myrrh as a Functional Food with Therapeutic Properties Against Colon Cancer in Traditional Meals

Abstract

Using of natural products is considered one of the recent research approaches all over the world; however, natural products had been extensively used now days as functional and therapeutic food. Our study focused on the screening of myrrh effects as antioxidant, antimicrobial and antitumor. The antioxidant activity of myrrh was measured in different concentrations and it was observed that concentrations 10 and 20 µg/mL of were recorded to have inhibition percentage by 47.41 and 16.37%, respectively. Cytotoxicity results of the extract on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) indicated that generally, the acidic water extract was safer on cells comparing with that of the neutral extracts. The antimicrobial activity against some gram-negative, gram-positive bacteria and yeast showed no positive results. The phytochemical analysis indicated both of terpenoids, flavonoids and proteins were funded with high amounts. But the chemical analysis revealed that percentage of protein, fiber, moisture, lipids, ash and carbohydrates are 11.2, 1.30, 9.7, 0.57, 6.5 and 70.73, respectively. Elements were presented with low concentration except calcium was existed with high concentration in comparison to the other tested elements. These concluded results revealed that myrrh could be a promising therapeutic food which helps in controlling colon cancer or as a complementary anticancer food support without any probable toxic effect neither on normal human cells or the intestinal microbial flora. Practical Applications Myrrh can be used as a functional and therapeutic food and its extract could be added to milk, yogurt and traditional meals which may help in protecting the human from colon cancer. In addition, the results obtained from this study prove that myrrh is a strong antioxidant that has strong scavenging activity against free radicals.