Asteraceae

Taraxacum officinale

Dandelion

Untested Low

Part used: rootleafflower
Native range: Eurasia; naturalised worldwide and among the most widespread plants on earth
Morphology: A rosette perennial with deeply toothed leaves — the name is from dent de lion, lion’s tooth — a hollow milky stem, a single composite yellow head, and a spherical seed clock.

What is in it

sesquiterpene lactones taraxacin

triterpenes taraxasterol

inulin

potassium

Evidence

Almost no controlled human evidence despite ubiquity. A single small study supports the diuretic effect. The liver and detoxification claims are untested.

Safety

Eaten as a food. Allergy in those sensitive to other Asteraceae, and contact dermatitis from the latex. Very high potassium content, which is relevant to anyone with kidney impairment or on potassium-sparing drugs. Gallbladder caution is traditional.

Interactions: Potassium content interacts with potassium-sparing diuretics and ACE inhibitors; Diuretic effect may compound prescribed diuretics

Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient.

How the traditions classify it

Galenic Cold and dry. Used for the liver and as a diuretic — the French common name pissenlit and the English piss-a-bed both record the effect bluntly.

Chinese Pu gong ying — bitter, sweet and cold, for clearing heat and toxin, and used for mastitis.

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

Used across Europe, the Middle East and China, and independently in North America after introduction. Food as much as medicine: the leaves are eaten, the root roasted as a coffee substitute, the flowers made into wine.

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

Dandelion is a good demonstration that ubiquity and testing are unrelated. It is among the most widespread and most consistently used medicinal plants on the planet, present in European, Chinese, Middle Eastern and Native American practice, and it has almost no clinical trial literature at all.

Its diuretic effect is real and has an unglamorous explanation: the leaf is extremely high in potassium. Most diuretics deplete potassium, which is the main thing that limits them, so a diuretic that supplies it is genuinely different — and the traditional observation, recorded directly in pissenlit, was accurate about the effect if not about the cause.

Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.