From ‘In Defence of Food’ by Michael Pollan,   Penguin Books,  p64/65,  2008

‘Indeed, to look at the chemical compostion of any common food is to realise just how much complexity lurks within it. Here’s a list of just the antioxidents that have been identified in a leaf of garden variety thyme: alanine, anethole essential oil, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta-carotene, caffeic acid, camphene  ‘  (You get the picture, there are  29 more).

He goes on to say  ‘This is what you ingest when you eat food flavoured with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others go on to do various as-yet-undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps or intercepting a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell.  It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it might actually do some good ( since people have been eating it forever) and even if it does nothing at all, we like the way it tastes.