Lauraceae
Cinnamomum verum
True cinnamon · Ceylon cinnamon
- Part used
- bark
- Native range
- Sri Lanka and southern India
- Morphology
- An evergreen tree to about ten metres. The thin inner bark is peeled from young shoots and dries into fine, fragile, many-layered quills of a pale tan colour.
- Also known as
- Cinnamomum zeylanicum
What is in it
Evidence
Shares the inconsistent glycaemic literature with cassia, though most trials in fact used cassia. Little tested in its own right.
Safety
Coumarin content is a small fraction of cassia’s, which makes it the safer choice for anyone consuming cinnamon regularly. The essential oil is a mucous membrane irritant and must not be taken neat or applied undiluted.
Interactions: Theoretical additive effect with antidiabetic drugs
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Sri Lanka was the principal source and the trade was fought over by the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn. The Dutch East India Company held a monopoly on Ceylon cinnamon for over a century and burned surplus stock to keep the price up.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Two entries for cinnamon look redundant and are the point. These are different species with different chemistry, different safety profiles and a several-fold price difference, sold under one name in most of the world.
Sri Lanka's cinnamon trade is also a compact history of colonial extraction: Portuguese control, then Dutch, then British, with the Dutch East India Company holding a monopoly for over a century and destroying surplus harvests to hold the price. The plant that ended up cheap and ubiquitous in Anglophone kitchens is the other one.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.