Zingiberaceae
Elettaria cardamomum
Cardamom · Green cardamom · Elaichi
- Part used
- seedfruit
- Native range
- The Western Ghats of southern India
- Morphology
- A tall perennial to four metres with long leaves rising from a rhizome, and flower spikes that run along the ground bearing pale green three-sided capsules of small dark seeds.
What is in it
Evidence
Very little controlled evidence. A few small trials on blood pressure and metabolic markers.
Safety
A food, well tolerated as one. Gallstone colic is traditionally cautioned against. The essential oil is an irritant undiluted.
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
Traded from the Western Ghats since antiquity and among the most expensive spices by weight. Used for digestion and to sweeten the breath across South Asia and the Middle East, and chewed after meals.
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.
What it is taken for, and who says so
Sold mainly as a spice. Ayurvedic and Unani practice use it as a digestive and for respiratory complaints, and it is chewed as a breath freshener.
Recorded because it is what people believe, not because it is what the plant does. Whether any of it holds up is the Evidence section above, and the two frequently disagree. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the plant doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Cardamom is the third most expensive spice by weight after saffron and vanilla, and for the same reason: the capsules ripen unevenly and have to be hand-picked over repeated passes, several times per season.
It is included here partly as a control. It has a long medicinal history across three traditions, a pleasant and genuinely carminative effect, and almost no clinical evidence at all — because nobody has looked, rather than because anyone looked and found nothing. That distinction is what the untested label exists for, and roughly a fifth of this collection sits in it.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.