Papaya - a world class meat tenderizer, natural digestive aid, prevents ulcers, and also a soft contact lense cleaner.Papaya
Tropical Digestive Aid
Family: Caricaceae; (includes Custard Apple)
Genus and Species: Carica Papaya
Also known as; Pawpaw, Melon Tree
Parts used; Fruit, leaves, and late
Cookbooks warn that Jell-O won’t gel if you add pineapple.
The same is true if you add papaya, only more so. Both fruits contain digestive enzymes that prevent the proteins in gelatin from solidifying. Papaya’s powerful enzymes are key to its healing value as a digestive aid.
Super Meat Tenderizer
Centuries ago, the Caribbean Indians noticed that meat wrapped in papaya’s broad leaves becomes more tender. Today papaya extract is the active ingredient in most commercial meat tenderizers.
The Indians also cut incisions into mature but unripe papayas, collected the milky fluid (latex), and applied it to the skin to treat psoriasis, ringworm, wounds, and infections. Caribbean Indian women ate unripe papayas to trigger menstruation, abortion, and labor.
After Europeans introduced papaya into tropical Asia, it quickly became incorporated into healing. Filipinos used a root decoction to treat hemorrhoids. The Javanese believed eating papaya fruit prevented arthritis. The Japanese used the latex to treat digestive disorders. And throughout Asia, the leaves were applied to wounds, and the latex was dabbed onto the cervix at term to stimulate labor.
Papaya was not used in traditional American herbal medicine. But in the last 25 years, as tropical fruits have become widely available, papaya has become quite popular, and the plant’s leaves and latex have become available through specialty herb outlets.
Contemporary herbalists recommend papaya fruit and leaf infusions as digestive aids, for stomach upset, and to eliminate intestinal worms. Herbalists suggest applying the leaves and latex externally to wounds.