Lythraceae
Punica granatum
Pomegranate
- Part used
- fruitbarkroot
- Native range
- Iran to northern India; cultivated across the Mediterranean and the Middle East for millennia
- Morphology
- A deciduous shrub or small tree to eight metres with glossy narrow leaves and vivid orange-red flowers, bearing a leathery-skinned fruit packed with seeds each in a translucent juice-filled aril.
What is in it
Evidence
Trials on blood pressure and lipids report small effects. Prostate cancer trials, once promising, have not held up in larger studies. The US FTC took action against a major producer over unsupported health claims.
Safety
The fruit is a food. The root bark and rind are a different matter: pelletierine alkaloids are toxic, causing vomiting, dizziness and visual disturbance, and the historical anthelmintic use was genuinely hazardous. Juice inhibits drug-metabolising enzymes in a manner resembling grapefruit.
Interactions: Inhibits CYP3A4 and CYP2C9, raising levels of some drugs; Reported potentiation of warfarin
Regulatory: Permitted as a food. The fruit and the root bark are not interchangeable.
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
Among the oldest cultivated fruits and one of the most heavily symbolic — in Greek myth, Jewish practice, Christian art and Persian poetry. The root bark was a standard anthelmintic against tapeworm well into 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
Pomegranate is the clearest case of a marketing claim being stopped by a regulator rather than by the evidence going quiet.
The US Federal Trade Commission brought action against a major pomegranate juice producer over claims about heart disease, prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction, and the finding — upheld on appeal — was that the advertising was not supported by the science it cited. That is unusual: most of the unsupported claims in this collection have never been formally adjudicated at all.
Its family also moved. Pomegranates had their own family, Punicaceae, and are now placed in Lythraceae with the loosestrifes.
And the fruit and the root bark are different medicines with different risks — the root bark's alkaloids made it an effective and dangerous tapeworm treatment, and it is not what anyone means by pomegranate today.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.