Bilimbi fruit might not be a name of everybody’s lips but it is one with some interesting health benefits. The species refered to is Averrhoa bilimbi. L. and is in the Oxalidaceae family.

It has a number of common names including Cucumber tree and Tree Sorrel. More local names are Kamias, Belimbing Asam, Belimbing Buloh, Bimbiri.

The tree is small in size growing to 15m tall and 30cm in diameter. The tree is cultivated in the Moluccas, Indonesia and Malaysia. It is also semi-wild in Brazil, Philipines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

It is one with an extremely high oxalic acid content which puts it on a par with rhubarb but the fruit has long been sought after for its culinary uses with other foods. as with any high oxalate containing fruit, there is the risk of kidney issues such as nephropathy (Bakul et al., 2013).

The leaves rather than the fruit have been used as a traditional cure for coughs and colds, rashes, itch, rheumatism, bilious colic syphilis, diabetes, whooping cough and reducing blood pressure.

Bilimbi Extracts And Diabetes

Ethanolic extracts of the leaf are claimed to have hypoglycaemic and hypolipidaemic effects in a type-1 diabetic rat model (Pushparaj et al., 2000). Rat models are widely used to test plant extracts for their anti-diabetic effects and there are no exceptions with this. More recent evidence (Tan et al., 2005) has been put forward to demonstrate some benefits from the leaf but human studies remain to be validated. The alcoholic extracts appear to cause a drop in both blood glucose and lipid levels but whether this succeeds in people needs to be established.

References

Bakul, G., Unni, V. N., Seethaleksmy, N. V., Mathew, A., Rajesh, R., Kurien, G., … & Jose, P. P. (2013). Acute oxalate nephropathy due to ‘Averrhoa bilimbi’fruit juice ingestion. Indian Journal of Nephrology, 23(4), pp. 297.

Pushparaj, P., Tan, C. H., & Tan, B. K. H. (2000). Effects of Averrhoa bilimbi leaf extract on blood glucose and lipids in streptozotocin-diabetic rats. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 72(1), pp. 69-76

Tan, B. K. H., Tan, C. H., & Pushparaj, P. N. (2005). Anti–diabetic activity of the semi–purified fractions of Averrhoa bilimbi in high fat diet fed–streptozotocin–induced diabetic rats. Life Sciences, 76(24), pp. 2827-2839.