Royal jelly: a natural therapeutic?

Abstract

Royal jelly is a secretion of honeybees that is actually for feeding of bee larvae. It contains many bioactive substances such as jelleins, royalisin, major royal jelly proteins and 10-hydroxy-2-decenoic acid. Recently, many studies were published investigating activities of royal jelly. In overall, royal jelly found to have antioxidant, neurotrophic, antidiabetic, hypocholesterolemic, regulatory on blood pressure, antimicrobial, immunomodulatory, anti-tumor and tissue-protective effects. These activities are strongly related to each other and cannot be evaluated separately. Researchers claim that royal jelly can be an excellent therapeutic agent (or an additional agent), especially in treatments of cancer and metabolic syndrome. However, there are huge gaps due to limited number of in vivo studies and there are standardization issues both for usage and investigations. Furthermore, wide variability of contents in royal jelly due to geographic locations, climate, etc also causes a problem in choice of exact royal jelly. Currently it seems to be safe and effective nutritious agent for healthy people, but it is hard to gain an overall perspective in usage as a therapeutic, since there is a necessity of wider studies with more different types of royal jelly.