Apigenin: Dietary Sources (Parsley, Chamomile, Celery)

Apigenin is not distributed evenly across the plant kingdom. A handful of everyday foods carry almost all of it: parsley by a wide margin, then chamomile tea, celery and celery seed, and a scattering of dried culinary herbs. This page gives realistic content figures, explains the crucial difference between the apigenin bound to sugars in the plant and the free apigenin your body actually absorbs, and confronts the central caveat head-on — apigenin's oral bioavailability is low, which is why food is a better delivery vehicle than most claims imply and why "apigenin content" numbers can be misleading if read as "apigenin absorbed."

Table of Contents

  1. The Short List of Real Sources
  2. Parsley: The Richest Common Source
  3. Chamomile Tea
  4. Celery & Celery Seed
  5. Dried Herbs: Oregano, Thyme & More
  6. Glycosides vs Free Apigenin: What the Numbers Mean
  7. The Bioavailability Problem
  8. Getting More From Your Food
  9. Supplements & Safety
  10. Key Research Papers
  11. Connections
  12. Featured Videos

The Short List of Real Sources

One of the most useful facts about apigenin is how concentrated its food sources are. Rather than a little bit everywhere, most of the dietary apigenin people consume comes from just a few plants in the parsley family (Apiaceae) and the daisy family (Asteraceae). In rough order of importance for a typical diet:

  1. Parsley — far and away the richest common source, especially dried parsley.
  2. Chamomile tea — the most-consumed beverage source, and the one behind apigenin's calming reputation.
  3. Celery and celery seed — a staple vegetable source, with celery seed more concentrated than the stalk.
  4. Dried culinary herbs — oregano, thyme, and others contribute meaningfully by weight because drying concentrates the flavones.
  5. Minor sources — small amounts appear in some peppers, artichoke, and citrus.

Reviews of dietary apigenin, such as Wang and colleagues (2019), consistently identify this same short list and note that overall population apigenin intake is low and highly skewed toward people who eat a lot of parsley, celery, and herbs, or who drink chamomile tea regularly.

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Parsley: The Richest Common Source

Parsley is in a class of its own. In the widely used USDA Database for the Flavonoid Content of Selected Foods, parsley records by far the highest apigenin values of any common food — fresh parsley is reported on the order of 200 mg or more of apigenin per 100 g, and dried parsley substantially higher still because drying removes water and concentrates the flavone. No other everyday food comes close on a per-gram basis.

The practical catch is portion size. You might eat 100 g of celery in a sitting, but a tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley as a garnish is only a few grams, and a teaspoon of dried parsley is a fraction of a gram. So while parsley is the most apigenin-dense food, the amount you get depends entirely on whether you treat it as a garnish or as an ingredient. Parsley-forward dishes — tabbouleh (which can use whole bunches of parsley), chimichurri, salsa verde, and green sauces — are among the highest realistic dietary deliveries of apigenin available.

In the plant, parsley's apigenin is stored largely as apiin (apigenin-7-O-apioglucoside), a sugar-bound form that must be cleaved during digestion to release absorbable apigenin — a theme we return to below.

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Chamomile Tea

Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) is the source most people associate with apigenin, thanks to the tea's traditional use for calm and sleep covered on the Calm & Sleep page. In the flower heads, apigenin is present mostly as apigenin-7-O-glucoside (cosmosiin) and related glycosides. Analytical work such as Nováková and colleagues (2010), which developed UHPLC-MS/MS methods for phenolics in chamomile flowers and tea, confirms these glycosides as major constituents.

How much apigenin actually ends up in your cup depends on several things you control:

Even so, the apigenin in a single cup of tea is modest, and much of it is the glycoside form that is incompletely absorbed. Chamomile tea is best understood as a gentle, pleasant, low-dose source — consistent with its gentle effects — rather than a high-potency apigenin delivery.

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Celery & Celery Seed

Celery (Apium graveolens) is a reliable everyday vegetable source of apigenin, usually accompanied by its cousin luteolin. The apigenin is concentrated more in the leaves and seeds than in the pale stalks, and celery seed is notably richer than the stalk — Hang and colleagues (2022) developed green-chemistry methods specifically to extract apigenin and luteolin from celery seed. Because celery is eaten in real quantity (a whole stalk, a cup of diced celery in a soup base), it can contribute more total apigenin to a day than a parsley garnish despite its lower per-gram content.

Celery apigenin has enough commercial and agricultural interest that researchers have engineered celery to make more of it: Tan and colleagues (2017) showed that overexpressing a flavone-synthase gene increased apigenin (while decreasing anthocyanins) in celery petioles, and Sun and colleagues (2025) built a monoclonal-antibody immunoassay to quantify apigenin in celery precisely. The takeaway for a home cook: use the leaves and don't discard celery tops, and celery seed (in spice blends, pickling, and celery-salt) is a small but concentrated addition.

For celery as a whole food and the celery-juice trend, see our Celery page and Celery Juice page.

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Dried Herbs: Oregano, Thyme & More

Because drying concentrates flavones, several dried culinary herbs punch above their weight for apigenin per gram — dried oregano and thyme are commonly cited examples, along with dried parsley (above). The catch, again, is portion: you use these in teaspoon quantities, so their contribution to total intake is real but small compared with a parsley-heavy dish or a habit of chamomile tea.

Still, herbs are a "free" way to nudge apigenin (and a wide range of other beneficial polyphenols) upward: generously herbing your cooking adds flavones at essentially no calorie cost and improves flavor. The general principle — that the apigenin in the food travels with dozens of other beneficial plant compounds — is exactly why whole-food sources beat isolated supplements for most people.

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Glycosides vs Free Apigenin: What the Numbers Mean

This is the single most important technical point for reading any apigenin "content" figure. In plants, apigenin is almost never present as the free molecule (the "aglycone"). It is bound to sugars as a glycoside — apiin in parsley and celery, cosmosiin (apigenin-7-O-glucoside) in chamomile, and others. Food-composition databases may report either the free aglycone after chemical hydrolysis, the intact glycosides, or a converted "total apigenin" value, and these are not the same number. That is one reason published apigenin contents for the same food can differ severalfold between sources and methods.

It matters biologically because your body has to cleave the sugar off before it can absorb the apigenin, a job done partly by enzymes in the small intestine and largely by bacteria in the colon. Which glycoside it is, and which gut bacteria you have, both affect how much free apigenin is released and absorbed. So a food's listed apigenin content is an upper bound on what you might get, not a measure of what you actually absorb.

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The Bioavailability Problem

Apigenin's oral bioavailability is low, and this is the caveat that governs the honesty of every apigenin health claim on this site. The human data are clear on the mechanics:

Borges and colleagues (2022) tracked the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of apigenin and its glycosides in healthy men and documented exactly this pattern of low, heavily-conjugated systemic exposure. Tang and colleagues (2017) reviewed apigenin's pharmacokinetics and drug interactions in the same vein. This is why researchers pursue enhanced-delivery formulations — nanoemulsions and self-nanoemulsifying systems (Sato and colleagues, 2024), phospholipid complexes, and potassium-salt derivatives (Sánchez-Marzo and colleagues, 2019) — to try to raise how much actually gets absorbed.

The honest interpretation is not "apigenin does nothing." It is that the dramatic effects seen in high-concentration lab experiments should not be assumed to occur at the low levels food produces, and that no one should overpay for an apigenin supplement expecting drug-like results.

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Getting More From Your Food

If you want to raise dietary apigenin sensibly — as part of an overall plant-rich diet, not as a magic bullet — a few practical levers help:

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Supplements & Safety

Isolated apigenin is sold as a supplement, often marketed for sleep or "longevity." A few honest points:

For most people, the reasonable position is to enjoy apigenin-rich foods for their flavor and their whole-diet benefits, treat chamomile tea as a gentle wind-down ritual, and view isolated supplements with measured skepticism.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Wang M et al. (2019). A review on flavonoid apigenin: dietary intake, ADME, antimicrobial effects, and interactions with human gut microbiota. BioMed Research International. — PubMed 31737673
  2. Borges G et al. (2022). Absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of apigenin and its glycosides in healthy male adults. Free Radical Biology and Medicine. — PubMed 35452808
  3. Tang D, Chen K, Huang L, Li J (2017). Pharmacokinetic properties and drug interactions of apigenin, a natural flavone. Expert Opinion on Drug Metabolism & Toxicology. — PubMed 27766890
  4. Nováková L et al. (2010). UHPLC-MS/MS determination of phenolic compounds in chamomile flowers and chamomile tea extracts. Talanta. — PubMed 20801328
  5. Engelhardt UH et al. (1993). Determination of flavone C-glycosides in tea. Zeitschrift für Lebensmittel-Untersuchung und -Forschung. — PubMed 8237118
  6. Hang NT et al. (2022). Green extraction of apigenin and luteolin from celery seed using deep eutectic solvent. J. Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. — PubMed 34653746
  7. Tan GF et al. (2017). AgFNS overexpression increases apigenin and decreases anthocyanins in petioles of transgenic celery. Plant Science. — PubMed 28818381
  8. Sun D et al. (2025). Development of apigenin monoclonal antibodies and an immunoassay for the quantification of apigenin in celery. Food Chemistry. — PubMed 41240868
  9. Sánchez-Marzo N et al. (2019). Antioxidant and photoprotective activity of apigenin and its potassium salt derivative in human keratinocytes and absorption in Caco-2 cell monolayers. Int. J. Molecular Sciences. — PubMed 31052292
  10. Sato VH et al. (2024). Enhancement of in vitro transcellular absorption and in vivo oral bioavailability of apigenin by self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems. Scientific Reports. — PubMed 39738511
  11. Cai H et al. (2007). Tissue distribution in mice and metabolism in murine and human liver of apigenin and tricin. Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology. — PubMed 17089164

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: apigenin dietary intake
  2. PubMed: apigenin bioavailability / absorption
  3. PubMed: apigenin content in parsley / celery
  4. PubMed: chamomile apigenin glycosides

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Connections

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