Referred to as bael in India, wood apple is not only a must-have during summers but a cure for several ailments
The fruit is eaten plain, mixed in a variety of beverages and desserts, or preserved as jam. The scooped-out pulp from its fruit is eaten raw, with or without sugar. Blended with coconut milk and palm-sugar syrup and drunk as a beverage. Or frozen as an ice cream. It is also used in chutneys and for making jelly and jam. Its pulp/paste is eaten with sugar or jaggery or even honey.
The bael fruit is more popular as medicine than as food. The Yajur Veda mentions the bael tree. But the Charaka Samhita, an Ayurveda treatise from the 1st millennium BC, was the first book to describe its medicinal properties.
The unripe fruit is described as astringent and is used in combination with bela and other medicines in diarrhoea and dysentery.
The ripe fruit is said to be useful in hiccups and affections of the throat. The leaves are aromatic and carminative.
The fruit is widely used in India as a liver and cardiac tonic. And when unripe, as an astringent means of halting diarrhea and dysentery and effective treatment for hiccough and sore throat.
The pulp is poulticed onto bites and stings of venomous insects, as is the powdered rind. leaves, bark, roots and fruit pulp are all used against snakebite.
The seed oil is a purgative, and the leaf juice mixed with honey is a folk remedy for fever.
The tannin-rich and alkaloid-rich bark decoction is a folk cure for malaria.
The pulp, taken complete with the seed and fibre, is prescribed as a remedy for irritable bowel syndrome in Sinhalese Medicine. Vasco da Gama’s crew, suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery in India, used to the bael fruit for relief.
A hundred gms of wood apple (bael fruit) pulp contains 31 gms of carbohydrate and two gms of protein, which adds up to nearly 140 calories.
The ripe fruit is rich in beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A; it also contains significant quantities of the B vitamins thiamine and riboflavin, and small amounts of Vitamin C.
Wild bael fruit tends to have more tannin than the cultivated ones; tannin depletes the body of precious nutrients, and evidence suggests it can cause cancer.