Ginger

Zingiber officinale

Evidence: Moderate

Few botanicals are as trusted for the stomach as ginger. Its warming pungency comes from gingerols and shogaols, compounds that have made it a go-to digestive root across cultures and centuries. Ginger is traditionally used to settle the stomach and support comfortable digestion, and it remains one of the most extensively researched culinary botanicals in the scientific literature.

We include it to round out the formula's digestive-comfort botanicals alongside peppermint and fennel, drawing on both its deep traditional pedigree and a large modern evidence base.

PubMed indexes over 7,300 peer-reviewed papers on ginger.

Selected study

Anh NH, Kim SJ, Long NP, et al. Ginger on Human Health: A Comprehensive Systematic Review of 109 Randomized Controlled Trials. Nutrients. 2020;12(1):157. doi:10.3390/nu12010157

Study summary

Study type: PRISMA-guided systematic review of 109 randomised controlled human trials, with risk of bias assessed using the Cochrane tool.

Observed benefits across the trials reviewed:

• Settling of the stomach in several contexts.
• Modest improvements in markers of blood sugar and blood lipids in metabolic trials.
• Faster gastric emptying in motility studies.

Mechanisms: Gingerols and shogaols act on digestive signalling pathways, engage oxidative and inflammatory pathways at the cellular level, and support gastric motility.

Safety: No serious events across trials reporting safety; the most common report was mild heartburn.

Evidence strength: A large pooled evidence base, though most individual trials are small, short and varied in dose.