Asteraceae
Cynara cardunculus
Globe artichoke · Cardoon
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- The Mediterranean
- Morphology
- A large thistle to two metres with deeply divided silver-grey leaves and enormous violet flower heads. The globe artichoke is a cultivated form of the wild cardoon, selected for its fleshy bracts and receptacle.
- Also known as
- Cynara scolymus
What is in it
Evidence
Modest evidence for functional dyspepsia and small effects on cholesterol. A Cochrane review of artichoke for hypercholesterolaemia found effects too small and trials too few to recommend it.
Safety
A food. Allergy in those sensitive to other Asteraceae. Bile-stimulating effect means caution in biliary obstruction. Inulin content causes wind.
Interactions: Theoretical effects on bile flow
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed 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
Eaten and used medicinally across the Mediterranean since antiquity. Artichoke leaf extract has been a standard German digestive preparation since the twentieth century.
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
Artichoke is a good plant to end a collection on, because it is entirely ordinary and it makes the point the whole section rests on.
Cynarin, its principal bitter, has a well-documented and easily demonstrated effect: it suppresses sweet perception temporarily, which is why water tastes sweet immediately after eating an artichoke. That is a real, reproducible pharmacological action on a human being, from a vegetable, that anyone can verify at dinner.
It is also almost entirely beside the point medically. The digestive and cholesterol evidence is modest and unexciting, and the plant's genuine claim to attention is that it is delicious.
Most of the one hundred and fifty entries here are somewhere on that spectrum: a real chemistry, a long history, a modest or absent clinical effect, and a set of hazards that depend far more on the preparation and the dose than on the plant.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.