Holy Basil

Why an Ancient Sacred Plant Is Still Relevant Today

Every ingredient has a story.

Some begin in laboratories. Others in oceans, forests or the chemistry of the early Earth.

Holy Basil’s story begins somewhere more intimate: in people’s homes.

For centuries, Tulsi Ocimum tenuiflorum, also known as Holy Basil, has occupied a remarkable place in Indian culture and Ayurvedic tradition. It has been grown around homes and temples, used in daily rituals and valued as a medicinal plant.

Few plants have managed to become simultaneously botanical, medicinal, domestic and sacred.

Which raises an interesting question.

What makes a plant survive not only in nature, but in culture?

A Sacred Plant Before It Was a Scientific One

Long before anyone measured cortisol, inflammatory markers or oxidative stress, people observed plants.

They noticed what happened when they ate them, brewed them, applied them or used them repeatedly. Some disappeared from traditional practice. Others remained for generations.

Tulsi remained.

Within Ayurveda, its traditional uses became extraordinarily broad, encompassing respiratory health, digestion and general wellbeing. It came to be regarded as a rasayana, a category of plants and preparations traditionally associated with promoting resilience and maintaining health.

From a modern scientific perspective, such breadth should make us cautious. A plant reputed to do everything can very easily become a plant marketed as doing everything.

But it should also make us curious.

Why did this particular plant become so deeply embedded in everyday life?

Why Scientists Became Interested

This question feels particularly familiar to me.

My interest in Ayurveda began long before Vivana. In 1999, as part of my pharmacy doctorate at the University of Bordeaux 2, I studied traditional postpartum practices among Malay women, followed by an ethnobotanical and scientific investigation of ginger.¹

What fascinated me then, and still does today, wasn’t simply that certain plants had been used for generations. I wanted to understand why.

Why this plant? Why this preparation? Why had generations of women continued to use it?

Could empirical knowledge point us towards biological mechanisms that modern pharmacology could investigate?

That question has stayed with me ever since.

Tulsi presents exactly that kind of puzzle.

Modern analysis has identified numerous biologically active compounds in the plant, including eugenol, rosmarinic acid, ursolic acid, apigenin and luteolin. Research has subsequently explored their potential relevance to oxidative stress, inflammatory signalling and other biological pathways.²

And this is where an ancient medicinal plant acquired a distinctly modern label:

Adaptogen.

What Does “Adaptogen” Actually Mean?

Adaptogen has become one of those wellness words that risks meaning everything and therefore nothing.

The original concept is more interesting.

Adaptogens were proposed as substances that could help an organism adapt to stress and maintain physiological balance, rather than targeting one particular symptom or pathway.

That’s an important distinction.

Stress itself isn’t necessarily pathological.

Your stress response gets you out of bed, sharpens attention when something matters, mobilises energy when you need it and helps you respond to threat. Cortisol is not a toxin that needs to be eliminated. It is an essential hormone.

The problem arises when the systems designed to respond to challenge are repeatedly called upon without sufficient opportunity to recover.

The objective, therefore, shouldn’t necessarily be to switch stress off.

A more interesting question is whether we can support the body’s capacity to respond, adapt and recover.

That is where Tulsi becomes particularly relevant.

An Ancient Plant Meets Modern Stress

The sabre-toothed tiger may have disappeared from our daily lives.

The emails haven’t.

Neither have deadlines, poor sleep, family responsibilities, financial pressures, constant notifications or the peculiar modern expectation that we should remain available to everyone at almost all times.

Our stress response is ancient.

Our stressors have changed.

Human research into Tulsi remains relatively limited, but there are encouraging findings. A six-week double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving 150 participants found improvements in several self-reported stress-related symptoms with a Tulsi extract compared with placebo.³

More recently, an eight-week randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 100 adults experiencing stress found improvements in perceived stress and subjective sleep measures. The researchers also observed lower hair cortisol and a reduced physiological response to an experimentally induced acute stressor in the Tulsi group.⁴

These findings are interesting.

They are not enough to turn Tulsi into a universal answer to modern stress.

Nor should they be.

Its story is more interesting than that.

Tulsi invites us to think about stress not simply as something to remove, but as something the body continuously learns to navigate.

Ancient Wisdom Isn’t Automatically Right

This is where conversations about traditional medicine can become unnecessarily polarised.

Something doesn’t become scientifically true simply because people have used it for two thousand years.

Tradition is a wonderful place to find hypotheses. It is not the place to stop asking questions.

But dismissing generations of observation simply because those observations predate randomised controlled trials would be equally unscientific.

Traditional knowledge can tell us where to look.

Phytochemistry can tell us what is there.

Pharmacology can begin to explain what those molecules do.

Clinical research can then ask the most important question: does any of it meaningfully translate into humans?

The most interesting discoveries often happen when traditional knowledge and rigorous science finally meet.

Tulsi sits precisely at that intersection.

Why We Chose Tulsi for Cortisol Control

When we designed Cortisol Control, we weren’t interested in creating a formula that simply promised to “lower cortisol”.

That would misunderstand the biology.

Cortisol has a job.

Stress has a job.

The body’s stress response has kept humans alive for rather longer than modern wellness has existed.

What interested us was resilience: supporting the biological systems that allow us to respond to everyday challenges and then recover from them.

Tulsi earned its place in Cortisol Control because that is precisely where its traditional history and emerging scientific rationale converge.

It isn’t there to make life stress-free.

Frankly, we’d need a considerably bigger capsule for that.

Or we’d have to recommend withdrawing to a desert island or a cave, safely removed from deadlines, traffic, family logistics, WhatsApp groups and the rest of humanity.

But we’re not particularly interested in being outside life.

We’re interested in being right in the middle of it. Better.

Why Tulsi and Ashwagandha Together?

Tulsi isn’t working alone in Cortisol Control.

We paired it with another plant with a long history in Ayurveda: Ashwagandha.

And this is where the formulation becomes particularly interesting.

In Ayurvedic tradition, the two plants have different characters.

Ashwagandha is grounding.

Traditionally described as nourishing and restorative, it is associated with rebuilding reserves when prolonged stress has left the body depleted.

Modern clinical research is considerably more developed for Ashwagandha than for Tulsi. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of nine randomised controlled trials involving 558 participants found significant effects on perceived stress, anxiety scores and serum cortisol compared with placebo, although differences between formulations and studies remain important.⁵

A separate systematic review examining cortisol specifically also concluded that the available clinical trials generally reported reductions following Ashwagandha supplementation, while highlighting substantial variation in formulations, doses, duration and study populations.⁶

Tulsi brings another quality.

Ayurvedic tradition describes it differently from the more restorative character associated with Ashwagandha. This gave us an interesting starting point when considering how the two plants might complement one another in the same formula.

Modern science adds another intriguing piece.

In the 2022 clinical trial, participants taking Tulsi showed a smaller physiological response when exposed to an acute laboratory stressor, including lower salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase responses than placebo.⁴

We are also interested in the emerging idea that Tulsi may help modulate the reactivity of the stress response, something you might loosely imagine as buffering the peaks rather than simply pushing cortisol down. But this needs additional investigation.

I like to think about the pairing more simply:

Ashwagandha provides the anchor. Tulsi helps us keep moving.

We don’t need to assign each plant an artificially precise job to understand why they belong together.

Ayurveda expressed the idea centuries ago in its own language.

Modern physiology is investigating it in another.

Resilience requires both stability and responsiveness.

Grounded, but not flattened.

Calm, but still alert.

Supported, but very much in the game.

Working With Biology

And there’s something familiar about this philosophy.

NAC, another ingredient we’ve written about, doesn’t replace the liver’s protective systems. It provides cysteine, helping the body produce the glutathione those systems rely upon.

Tulsi and Ashwagandha come from a completely different tradition, but the philosophy is surprisingly similar.

Give the body better support to do what it already knows how to do.

We don’t fight ageing. We support regeneration.

We don’t fight cortisol. We support adaptation.

We don’t fight menopause. We support women through it.

We don’t formulate against biology.

We formulate with it.

Perhaps that is why an ancient plant can still feel so relevant today.

The world around us has changed enormously.

The body’s need to adapt has not.

Discover The Complete System

References

1.  Benoit A-G. La médication du post-partum chez la femme malaise : étude ethnobotanique suivie d’une étude des Gingembres. Thèse de Doctorat en Pharmacie. Université Bordeaux 2; 1999.

2.  Bhattarai K, et al. A Comprehensive Review of the Phytochemical Constituents and Bioactivities of Ocimum tenuiflorum. 2024. PMCID: PMC11521583; PMID: 39473808.

3.  Saxena RC, Singh R, Kumar P, et al. Efficacy of an Extract of Ocimum tenuiflorum (OciBest) in the Management of General Stress: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2012;2012:894509. DOI: 10.1155/2012/894509.

4.  Lopresti AL, Smith SJ, Metse AP, Drummond PD. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial investigating the effects of an Ocimum tenuiflorum (Holy Basil) extract (Holixer™) on stress, mood, and sleep in adults experiencing stress. Frontiers in Nutrition. 2022;9:965130. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2022.965130.

5.  Arumugam V, Vijayakumar V, Balakrishnan A, et al. Effects of Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) on stress and anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Explore. 2024;20(6):103062. DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2024.103062.

6.  Effects of Withania somnifera on Cortisol Levels in Stressed Human Subjects: A Systematic Review. Nutrients. 2023;15(24):5015. DOI: 10.3390/nu15245015.