The Ancient Herb Perilla May Calm Gut Inflammation, Research Review Finds

If you already suspect your gut is behind a health issue you are dealing with, chances are you have gone looking for anything, food, herb, or supplement, that might calm inflammation without a prescription pad. A review just resurfaced that puts one such candidate under the microscope: Perilla frutescens, the East Asian mint-family herb better known in kitchens as shiso, purple mint, or beefsteak plant. The review does not report new experiments. Instead, it gathers everything peer-reviewed science had published on the plant through 2018 and asks what actually holds up. One thread running through that evidence: a Perilla extract calmed gut inflammation in mice.

Key takeaways

• A 2019 review in the journal Molecules rounds up published laboratory and animal research on Perilla frutescens, an East Asian herb also called shiso or perilla mint, covering its anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, and antioxidant effects.
• The one gut-relevant finding: in mice, a Perilla extract eased dextran sulfate sodium-induced colitis (a lab model that mimics inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD) by tamping down two inflammation-signaling pathways, NF-kB and STAT3.
• This is a review of existing studies, not a new experiment. Almost all of the underlying evidence comes from mice, rats, and cell cultures; only one human study is cited in the entire paper, and it concerns seasonal allergies, not the gut.
• Perilla is already a common food and folk remedy across Asia, but the review's own author concludes that clinical trials and safety data in humans are too thin to call any of this proven.

Perilla Frutescens Review Rounds Up Anti-Inflammatory Evidence

A 2019 review in the journal Molecules pulled together published laboratory and animal research on Perilla frutescens (the mint-family herb also called shiso in Japan, zisu in China, and tia to in Vietnam), and found consistent anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-allergic activity across dozens of separate studies. The review's author identified 271 distinct natural compounds isolated from Perilla leaves, seeds, and stems so far, including phenolic acids, flavonoids, essential oils, and triterpenes. A handful of these, especially rosmarinic acid, perillaldehyde, luteolin, apigenin, and isoegomaketone, show up again and again as the compounds actually responsible for the plant's effects in lab and animal experiments. Perilla has been used medicinally in China since roughly 500 A.D., prescribed historically for everything from coughs and asthma to indigestion and constipation, and the review's goal was to check how much of that folk reputation is backed by modern pharmacology.

Why People Managing IBD or Digestive Issues Should Take Note

For readers managing Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD, a group of conditions marked by chronic inflammation of the digestive tract), the review's most relevant citation is a study showing that a Perilla frutescens extract "ameliorated inflammatory bowel disease" by protecting mice against dextran sulfate sodium-induced colitis, a standard lab method for triggering colon inflammation that mimics human IBD. The review's author points to two inflammation-signaling proteins, NF-kB and STAT3 (nuclear factor kappa B and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3, both master switches that turn on inflammatory genes throughout the body), as the likely targets. That finding traces back to a 2017 study in Frontiers in Pharmacology, which reported that Perilla extract eased colitis symptoms in mice partly by dialing down that same signaling pair. Perilla's marquee compound, rosmarinic acid, has separately been shown in other DSS-colitis mouse studies to work through the same NF-kB and STAT3 pathway, which is one reason researchers keep circling back to it.

A Literature Review, Not a New Experiment

It is worth being precise about what kind of paper this is. The author searched PubMed, Web of Science, Wiley, ScienceDirect, Elsevier, the American Chemical Society's database, SciFinder, and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, English-language studies on Perilla published up through 2018. Theses, dissertations, unpublished manuscripts, and purely computational (in silico) studies were excluded. That means every claim in the review, including the colitis finding, is a secondhand summary of somebody else's earlier experiment. No new mice were dosed, no new patients were enrolled, and no new lab work happened to produce this paper. Reviews like this are useful for spotting patterns across a scattered literature, but they cannot upgrade the underlying evidence: if the original colitis study was done in mice, the review does not make it a human finding.

What This Actually Means If You Are Watching Your Gut

None of this makes Perilla frutescens a proven treatment for IBD, and nothing in the review suggests you should use it that way. What it does show is a plausible biological mechanism, an anti-inflammatory extract quieting the same signaling pathways implicated in human gut inflammation, backed by one animal study rather than a body of clinical trials. Perilla leaf and seed oil are already widely eaten as food in Japan, China, and Korea, so if you already cook with shiso or use perilla oil, nothing here changes that. But treating a Perilla supplement as a substitute for prescribed IBD treatment, or expecting it to replicate what happened in mice, is not supported by anything in this review. If you are curious, this is a reasonable thing to mention to a gastroenterologist as a research topic, not something to self-prescribe around an existing diagnosis.

What the Review Does Not Establish

The gaps here are significant. The colitis result comes from a single animal study, not a replicated body of human trials, and the review itself cites only one human study in total, a small trial on Perilla extract for seasonal allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (hay-fever-like nasal symptoms), which has nothing to do with the gut. Safety data are similarly thin: the review's author notes that toxicology studies on Perilla are scarce, that one of its essential-oil compounds, perilla ketone, is documented to cause lung damage in livestock such as horses, sheep, and cows (with no equivalent evidence in humans), and that isolated case reports describe occupational asthma from inhaling roasted Perilla seed smoke and at least one anaphylactic reaction to Perilla seed. The review also flags that the taxonomy of Perilla species is, in its own words, "quite confused," meaning even scientists studying the plant do not fully agree on how to classify its varieties.

Where the Research Needs to Go Next

The review's own conclusion is a call for more clinical research, not a victory lap. Its author states plainly that while Perilla's traditional reputation for anti-allergy and antidepressant effects lines up reasonably well with the lab data, clinical studies overall are "insufficient" to establish proven efficacy or safety, and that human trials are needed across the board, including for any gut-related benefit. No specific trial or timeline is mentioned; the ball is simply in the court of future researchers willing to test Perilla extracts in people with a diagnosed digestive condition rather than in mice.

Common Questions

Is Perilla frutescens the same thing as shiso? Yes. Perilla frutescens is the scientific name for the plant sold and eaten as shiso in Japan, and it goes by other regional names including purple mint, zisu, and beefsteak plant.

Does this mean Perilla treats IBD? No. The only supporting evidence is a single mouse study using dextran sulfate sodium-induced colitis as a model for IBD. No human clinical trials of Perilla for digestive or gut conditions are cited in this review.

What are the active compounds in Perilla? The review highlights rosmarinic acid, perillaldehyde, luteolin, apigenin, tormentic acid, and isoegomaketone as the most studied of the 271 natural compounds identified in the plant so far.

Is Perilla safe to eat? It is already eaten routinely as a food herb across East Asia. That said, the review notes that formal toxicology research on Perilla is limited, and describes isolated case reports of allergic reactions and occupational asthma linked to it.

References

1. Hiwa M. Ahmed (2018). Ethnomedicinal, Phytochemical and Pharmacological Investigations of Perilla frutescens (L.) Britt. Molecules. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules24010102
2. Definition & Facts of Ulcerative Colitis (NIDDK / NIH). NIH. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/ulcerative-colitis/definition-facts
3. Deung Dae Park, Hye-Won Yum, Xiancai Zhong, et al. (2017). Perilla frutescens Extracts Protects against Dextran Sulfate Sodium-Induced Murine Colitis: NF-κB, STAT3, and Nrf2 as Putative Targets. Frontiers in Pharmacology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2017.00482