The pomegranate is consumed mainly as fruit, fresh juice, concentrated syrup, jelly, sauce, jam, tea infusion and plant extracts (e.g., capsules and tablets) (Zarfeshany et al., 2014). The consumption of pomegranate has spread worldwide and many research studies have reported experimental evidence on the health benefits of this plant. In this review, we perform a literature search to find the beneficial effects of oral consumption of pomegranate. This study can help improve our knowledge of the therapeutic effects of this plant and its use for preventing and treating different health conditions.
2. Methods
We used the PubMed database (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) to find previous research studies, which described the therapeutic effects of pomegranate consumption. We set the following PubMed options: article type (books and documents, clinical trial and randomized controlled trial), language (English) and publication date (2000 to 2021). We entered six keywords into the database: "Punica granatum", "pomegranate", "Punica granatum therapeutic effects", "Punica granatum health benefits", "Punica granatum medicinal properties" and "Punica granatum therapeutic properties".
After performing the search by keywords, we read the titles and abstracts of the articles and we chose those related to the beneficial effects of pomegranate consumption on human health. Then we read them carefully and we selected the appropriate research articles.
3. Results
Overall, we found 125 research studies, carrying out the literature search, and we selected 55 articles, which were suitable for defining the medicinal properties of pomegranate consumption. We describe 11 therapeutic effects of oral intake of pomegranate, which are reported in previous research studies. Our results show that oral consumption of pomegranate exerts beneficial effects on the nervous system, oxidative stress, the reproductive system, colitis, cancer, the cardiovascular system, diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome, parasitic infections, arthritis and skin health (Table 1).