How Does This Ayurvedic Food Improve Wellness?

CLINICAL AYURVEDIC REVIEW

Cleansing the Stomach

Cardamom offers more than its delightful and appetizing flavor, it is chock full of medicinal benefits. Cardamom is highly aromatic. Like perfume, it has a strong smell. This aromatic quality is the source of its use as an herbal pharmaceutical for centuries. Aromatic spices are a powerful friend to those with a myriad of digestive difficulties, from belching to vomiting and sluggish digestion. When food stagnates or moves up, cardamom moves it back down. It accelerates the gastric emptying rate, meaning it relaxes the stomach valves that prevent your food from entering the small intestine. That makes aromatic spices especially useful when your 'eyes are bigger than your stomach,' i.e. after thanksgiving or any heavy meal that bogs down your digestion, making you feel like there is a brick in your stomach. In the process, cardamom relieves nausea and has been used as an aid in morning sickness.

Muscle Relaxant

Remember the "fresh and clean as a York Peppermint Patty" commercials of the 80's? Peppermint, like cardamom, is a strong aromatic. All aromatics have a fresh and clean quality to them that is also somewhat shocking. This shocking quality literally numbs muscle tissue - forcing it to relax. That's why so many muscle balms - such as the Chinese formula Tiger Balm and Bengay are highly aromatic, familiar scents to anyone who has spent time at the gym.

Cardamom is no exception - it relaxes your muscle tissue, and is a calming antispasmodic useful in colic, asthma, and the throbbing pain of a headache (caused by a spasm in blood vessels). Aromatic herbs like cardamom and peppermint are so important, at Joyful Belly we consider cardamom to be the 'missing 7th taste of Ayurveda'.

Other Benefits

Cardamom is also Ayurveda's most powerful mucus destroyer. As with all aromatics, cardamom is a diaphoretic that opens your pores, encouraging a mild sweat that cleanses the skin, aids low grade fevers, and cleanses the lymphatic system. It is a bronchodilator - helping to improve breathing in asthmatics.

Use in Herb Formulas

Additionally, cardamom acts as a carrier herb, assisting in the digestion and assimilation of heavier herbs used in tonic formulas. Heavy herbs like shatavari, ashwagandha, vidari, and bala are made more accessible with cardamoms digestive assistance

About Cardamom

Love for cardamom resonates through history - for instance, ancient Egyptians chewed cardamom to whiten their teeth and sweeten their breath. Cardamom helps take the edge off of caffeine in the famous drink Turkish coffee. Cardamom is a member of the ginger plant family along with turmeric.

Buying & Preparation

The spice can be purchased as a grayish powder, in the form of the whole light-green pod, or as the tiny uncrushed seed within the pod. The essential oils (the fresh taste and the medicinal value) evaporate quickly after it is ground. For this reason, we recommend the uncrushed seed. If you buy whole pods, peel the outer layer of skin from the pod. Then grind in a coffee grinder or crush with a mortar and pestle just before use.

Cooking Cardamom

Cardamom is a fresh and wonderful garnish in beverages and on fruits. The unmistakable accent of cardamom is a key ingredient of Indian chai, a spicy tea with ginger, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Cardamom is common in many desserts like rice pudding, where it reduces the mucus-forming qualities of dairy products. In Scandinavian countries, this versatile, pleasant and aromatic spice is perfect accompaniment to a lamb roast, helping protein digestion. As a strong spice, we generally use 1/8tsp per person in recipes.Browse Recipes