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What is Evening Primrose Oil
What is Evening Primrose Oil?
What is evening primrose oil? What does it do when we take it? What is evening primrose oil good for?
The evening primrose flower can be pale like a primrose or far duskier.
What are the benefits of using evening primrose oil?
Here is a page about the benefits of taking evening primrose oil and the part that essential fatty acids play in good health.There is a lot to learn about the benefits of evening primrose oil; this article is an introduction to the topic.
For the sake of brevity, I refer to evening primrose oil as EPO in parts of this article.
To begin to answer the question "What is evening primrose oil?" we need to first look at the plant it comes from.
What is evening primrose oil? The plant
The evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) is a tall, handsome plant bearing yellow flowers which - as the name suggests - come into their own around nightfall. The plant looks nothing like a spring primrose. Although yellow, the colour of the flowers is often deeper than the pale icy shades of the spring primrose. The plant bears abundant seed pods which deliver hundreds of seeds rich in an oil with valuable health properties.
It is a native of Mexico and probably migrated northward with tribes peoples. The benefits of evening primrose oil were noticed by North American Indians who used the plant for healing wounds and treating swellings.
The seeds arrived in Europe by sea. Soil used as ballast was thrown out near docklands and the plants spread from there.
In the 1920s some tests were done to determine the nutritional elements of evening primrose oil.
Evening primrose burst into the public consciousness in the 1970s. A small firm called Efamol began promoting and testing the effects of evening primrose oil on a variety of complaints. The oil has been grown commercially ever since Efamol conducted those experiments which showed the promise of the oil as a health supplement.
What is evening primrose oil?
So what's it got that other oils have not?
Evening primrose oil is rich in GLA - Gamma-Linolenic acid which is a type of "essential fatty acid" (EFA).
Essential fatty acids play a crucial role in our metabolism - essential, as the name suggests! They are in fact foods. Our bodies are able to use the elements such foods provide to maintain health.
GLA is used for a variety of roles but in particular it helps the body to manufacture prostaglandins which have a key role in fighting infection and inflammation in the body.
Prostaglandins are affected adversely by poor diet, aging and other factors, so it is important to give your body every opportunity to aid their production. EPO helps the body produce the prostaglandin PGE1 which is known for its anti-inflammatory and blood-thinning properties.
Evening primrose oil (EPO) is not the only source of these valuable and rare EFAs. You get some GLA in blackcurrant seeds, for example. Othe...
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