Aloe vera juice is all over TikTok as the latest skincare and digestive health hack

April 11, 2022

Leave it to TikTok to discover (or, in this case, rediscover) all the best health trends. With over 13 million views on the hashtag, the spotlight currently belongs to aloe vera juice, a beverage many TikTokers claim can help clear breakouts, improve digestive health, and boost overall well-being, reports Bustle.

Aloe vera juice has been around for ages and is well-known for its nutrients and anti-inflammatory properties, says Dr. Laura DeCesaris, a clinical nutritionist and functional-medicine certified practitioner. But, she says, there’s an extra demand right now for multi-tasking functional beverages.

“Essentially, if you’re already going to be drinking fluids, it’s popular to look for options that have extra health benefits to help increase energy and vitality,” DeCesaris tells Bustle.

The juice comes from the cool, pulpy gel found inside the aloe vera leaf, which is then combined with water to create a drink, says DeCesaris. Yes, it’s the same stuff you put on sunburns too.

Aloe vera juice is widely available in bottles and jugs at grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, as well as online and in health food stores. “You can drink it on its own or add it to a glass of water with a squeeze of citrus for a refreshing beverage,” she tells Bustle. Or, if you think it’s too bitter, you can blend it into a smoothie, mix it with sparkling water, or stir it into fruit juice.

While more research is needed to validate all of the potential benefits, DeCesaris says a few studies have shown that aloe vera juice may reduce symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which includes digestive issues like constipation, bloating, and diarrhea. There’s also some evidence to suggest that it may help ease symptoms of heartburn, and that it may enhance the effectiveness of pharmaceutical interventions for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)—all great information to note if you’re prone to indigestion.

This may be because aloe vera juice is anti-inflammatory in nature, DeCesaris explains, and because it has “mucilaginous benefits” or a gel-like consistency that coats the lining of your stomach to reduce acid secretion. Then there are the antioxidants, like vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene, which she says can help to reduce inflammation even more and fight free radicals in the body.

While you might want to drink aloe vera juice for those digestion benefits, there are countless videos touting the drink’s many potential skin benefits, too. But does it really help if you drink it?

While TikTok says yes, naturopathic physician Dr. Alyssa DeSena isn’t so sure. “Most of the evidence supporting aloe vera’s use in acne is when aloe is used topically,” she tells Bustle. “There is not much on how aloe vera juice affects people who suffer with acne and psoriasis if they drink the juice.”

That said, DeSena points out that many folks who have breakouts and psoriasis often have gut health issues too, which is why drinking something that heals inflammation on the inside may lead to visible benefits on the outside. It’s just one of those online trends that research still needs to catch up with to fully understand its benefits as a natural remedy.

One word of warning: Aloe vera juice is a natural laxative, which is great news if you’re feeling constipated, but not so great if you already have regular bowel movements.

To make sure you don’t overdo it or upset your system, DeCesaris recommends drinking “inner leaf” aloe vera juice rather than “whole leaf.” It’s a bit milder in flavor and it’s less likely to cause loose stools, she says.

Start by drinking two ounces a day to see how you tolerate it, before slowly increasing to four ounces a day. “Everyone responds to foods, herbs, and drinks differently,” DeCesaris adds. “If you’re currently taking any medications, it’s a good idea to check with your doctor first before adding aloe to your routine.”

Research contact: @bustle

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast