What are the Recommended Empirical Effects of Peppermint Oil?

Peppermint essential oil is mainly extracted from the stems, leaves, and flowers of peppermint by distillation. The main components are menthol and menthol. Due to its special spicy and fresh taste and the cool feeling after use, it is often used in pharmaceutical cosmetics, personal hygiene products, food, and pharmaceutical products.

So what are the proven effects of peppermint oil?

1. Improve irritable bowel syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome is a multi-symptom periodic intestinal dysfunction disease, which affects about 5% to 15% of the population. Because the symptoms are very disturbing, it often reduces the quality of life of patients.

A meta-analysis (including 9 randomized placebo-controlled trials with 726 participants) showed that short-term (less than 2 weeks) oral peppermint oil was helpful to improve the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome and abdominal pain compared with placebo.

Conclusion: oral peppermint oil may be helpful for irritable bowel syndrome, but more long-term studies are needed to confirm its safety and effectiveness.

2. Relieve tension headache

Tension-type headache is the most common type of headache, which is mainly caused by muscle contraction in the head and neck. Unlike migraine, it does not have symptoms of nausea and vomiting.

A randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study of 41 patients with tension-type headache showed that topical application of 10% peppermint oil could reduce the intensity of clinical headache compared with placebo, and the improvement effect was not lost to the painkiller acetaminophen (Panadol and other painkillers).

Conclusion: topical application of peppermint oil can alleviate tension headaches, and has the advantages of high tolerance and low cost.

3. Improve performance

The importance of moderate exercise for the body and mind is well known. It can reduce cardiovascular disease, obesity, some cancers, Alzheimer's disease, depression, and anxiety.

A controlled study (30 male college students) pointed out that compared with the control group, oral peppermint essential oil not only helped to improve the performance of grip strength, in-situ vertical jump, and standing long jump, but also improved the measured values of vital capacity (such as maximum vital capacity, maximum inspiratory flow rate, and maximum expiratory flow rate), visual response time, sound response time, systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure.

The improvement of vital capacity may be related to the relaxation of the tension of the trachea and bronchi smooth muscle by peppermint essential oil.

Conclusion: the effect of oral peppermint essential oil on improving exercise performance and related cardiopulmonary function is still unknown, which needs to be verified by more research.

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