Caraway

Caraway (Carum carvi) is the crescent-shaped spice that gives many rye breads and sauerkraut dishes their familiar flavour. The “seed” is really a tiny dried fruit, and its aroma comes mostly from two compounds, carvone and limonene. The strongest human evidence is not for the kitchen spice but for enteric-coated capsules combining peppermint oil with caraway oil: in several small four-week trials they eased chronic indigestion (functional dyspepsia) better than placebo, and an independent Cochrane review rates that evidence moderate-certainty. Claims about weight loss, blood sugar and breast milk rest on one small trial, rat studies and tradition; as a food caraway is safe for nearly everyone, but people allergic to celery, carrot or fennel, or to birch or mugwort pollen, should be careful, and the essential oil is a concentrated medicine, not a seasoning.

Table of Contents

  1. What Caraway Is: A Fruit, Not a Seed
  2. Rye Bread, Sauerkraut and Kümmel: Culinary and Traditional Use
  3. What Is Actually in It
  4. Indigestion (Functional Dyspepsia): The Peppermint–Caraway Oil Trials
  5. IBS, Bloating and Wind
  6. Weight and Blood Sugar: Thin Evidence
  7. What Animal and Lab Studies Suggest
  8. How People Use It: Seeds, Tea, Capsules and Oil
  9. Myths and Overclaims in Popular Videos
  10. Safety, Interactions and Who Should Avoid It
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

What Caraway Is: A Fruit, Not a Seed

Caraway belongs to the carrot and parsley family (Apiaceae), the same family as fennel, dill, anise, coriander, cumin, celery, carrot, parsley and lovage. That family tree is why caraway allergy tends to travel with celery, carrot and fennel allergy (see Safety). Native to Europe and western Asia, the plant is usually a biennial — feathery, carrot-like leaves in the first year, then flat umbrellas of tiny white or pinkish flowers in the second — though annual types are grown too.

What you buy in a jar is not, botanically, a seed. Each brown crescent is one half of a small, dry, two-part fruit that splits down the middle as it ripens. The European Medicines Agency (EMA), following the European Pharmacopoeia, defines caraway fruit as “the whole, dry mericarp” — the botanical name for one of those halves (EMA assessment report). Pale ridges run along its length, and inside the fruit are tiny ducts that store the aromatic oil, which is why crushing caraway releases so much more aroma than leaving it whole.

Caraway is easy to confuse with its relatives, partly because of names. In German, Kümmel is caraway while Kreuzkümmel is cumin; Italian calls caraway cumino dei prati, “meadow cumin”. The name “black caraway” is attached to two different plants: Nigella sativa, the black seed of the buttercup family covered on our Black Seed page, and Bunium persicum, a separate carrot-family spice. Ajwain, once classified as Carum copticum, is another different plant (see Carum / Ajwain). Research on any of these is not research on caraway — and borrowed results from them are a common source of caraway claims online.

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Rye Bread, Sauerkraut and Kümmel: Culinary and Traditional Use

Caraway is one of the defining flavours of Central and Northern European cooking. It goes into dark rye and pumpernickel-style breads, into sauerkraut and braised cabbage, into goulash, sausages, pork roasts and potato dishes, and into cheese — the USDA nutrient database even carries a separate entry for “caraway cheese”. British cooks baked it into the traditional “seed cake”. It flavours drinks as well: kümmel, a sweet caraway liqueur, takes its name from the German word for the spice, and Scandinavian aquavit is traditionally flavoured with caraway or dill. Further south, Tunisian cooks grind it into harissa and other spice pastes.

It is often said that caraway was paired with cabbage, beans and rich meats to make them easier to digest. Whatever the origin, its reputation as a carminative — a remedy for wind and bloating — runs all through European herbal medicine. Caraway was also used for colic, and it has a contradictory history around breastfeeding: it is a purported galactagogue (a food said to increase milk supply), yet Persian traditional medicine used it to reduce an oversupply of milk, according to the U.S. government’s LactMed database.

European regulators accept part of that tradition, and are careful about how much. The EMA registers caraway fruit and caraway oil as traditional herbal medicines “for the symptomatic relief of digestive disorders such as bloating and flatulence”, and states that this rests “exclusively” on long-standing use (EMA: caraway fruit; EMA: caraway oil). In other words, the use is judged plausible and safe enough to register, not proven in trials.

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What Is Actually in It

The aroma: carvone and limonene

According to the EMA’s assessment report, caraway fruit contains roughly 3–7 mL of essential oil per 100 g, and the European Pharmacopoeia requires at least 30 mL of oil per kilogram of fruit. Two compounds dominate that oil. Carvone makes up 50–65% of pharmacopoeia-grade caraway oil and carries caraway’s warm, rye-bread smell; limonene, the compound that also scents citrus peel, makes up most of the rest (30–45%). Plant biochemists have traced how the fruit builds them: young fruit makes only limonene; as it develops, part of the limonene is stored in the oil ducts and part is converted, in two enzyme steps, into carvone (Bouwmeester 1998). Smaller constituents found in caraway oil include germacrene D and dihydrocarvone.

Carvone has a neat chemical twist. It exists in two mirror-image forms, like a left and a right hand. Caraway and dill make the d- (or S-) form; spearmint makes the l-form. Same atoms, same formula — yet one smells of caraway and the other of spearmint, because the smell receptors in your nose can tell the two shapes apart.

The rest of the fruit

Beyond its volatile oil, caraway is a small, dry, fibre-rich fruit. The EMA report describes 10–18% fixed (fatty) oil, made up mostly of petroselinic acid (30–43%) and linoleic acid (34–37%), along with protein, carbohydrate, phenolic acids such as caffeic acid, and traces of flavonoids such as quercetin and kaempferol.

Nutrients, measured per spoon

USDA FoodData Central (record 170918, “Spices, caraway seed”) lists, per 100 grams: 333 kcal, 19.8 g protein, 14.6 g fat, 38 g dietary fibre, 16.2 mg iron, 689 mg calcium and 258 mg magnesium. Those per-100-gram figures are why caraway turns up on “superfood” lists — but nobody eats 100 grams of caraway. USDA weighs a teaspoon of caraway at 2.1 g and a tablespoon at 6.7 g, which works out to (percentages are of the U.S. Daily Value):

So a generous spoonful in a pot of cabbage or a loaf of bread adds a useful pinch of fibre and of minerals such as iron to a day of cooking. It is a seasoning, not a supplement.

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Indigestion (Functional Dyspepsia): The Peppermint–Caraway Oil Trials

Functional dyspepsia means recurring upper-stomach pain or burning, early fullness, or heavy, bloated discomfort after meals, with no ulcer or other cause found on examination. It is common, it comes and goes, and it improves a lot on placebo — which is why only controlled trials can say whether a remedy really helps.

Almost all the good evidence involves one kind of product: an enteric-coated capsule containing 90 mg of peppermint oil and 50 mg of caraway oil, taken one capsule twice a day. The coating keeps the capsule closed in the stomach and releases the oils further along the gut. This is a standardised medicinal product — not the kitchen spice, and not a few drops of essential oil.

The German trials

A note on the 1999 comparison: cisapride was later restricted or withdrawn from the market because it can prolong the heart’s QT interval and provoke dangerous rhythms (Keller 2010), so it is no longer a benchmark anyone would choose.

Trials outside Germany

A team in Brisbane, Australia, ran a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of the same peppermint–caraway oil combination in 114 outpatients for four weeks (Rich 2017). On a validated dyspepsia questionnaire, pain scores improved by 7.6 points on the capsules versus 3.4 on placebo, and discomfort scores by 3.6 versus 1.3, with benefit in both main types of functional dyspepsia (after-meal fullness and upper-abdominal pain).

In the United States, a different product — caraway oil combined with L-menthol, the main active compound of peppermint, in capsules designed to open in the first part of the small intestine (25 mg caraway oil plus 20.75 mg L-menthol per capsule, two capsules twice a day) — was tested against placebo in 95 people who kept taking their usual indigestion medicines (Chey 2019). Within 24 hours the treated group reported significantly less after-meal distress, but at two and four weeks there was no significant difference in overall symptom scores for the group as a whole. Among people with more severe symptoms, about three in four improved on the capsules versus about half on placebo. It is an honest mixed result: some fast relief, no clear overall win at four weeks.

What the pooled evidence says

A 2019 meta-analysis pooled five randomised trials with 578 participants and found that the peppermint–caraway oil combination beat placebo for overall improvement and for upper-abdominal pain — roughly one extra person helped for every three treated — while warning that the trials were small and the quality of the evidence low to very low.

The most authoritative assessment is a 2023 Cochrane review of non-Chinese herbal medicines for functional dyspepsia, written by authors who declared no conflicts of interest. It concluded that peppermint and caraway oil probably produce a large improvement in overall dyspepsia symptoms compared with placebo at four weeks (two trials, 210 people) and increase the proportion of people who improve (three trials, 305 people), both rated moderate-certainty evidence, with little or no difference in side effects (low certainty). Compared with other active treatments, it may add little or nothing.

Caveats worth knowing

How might it work?

Not by speeding digestion. In 12 healthy volunteers, 50 mg of caraway oil did not significantly change how fast the stomach emptied or how fast a meal reached the large bowel, but both caraway oil and peppermint oil completely stopped the gallbladder from emptying during the test — a relaxing effect (Goerg and Spilker, 2003). In a 2024 Belgian study of 32 healthy volunteers, a single dose of a caraway-oil-and-menthol combination did not change stomach emptying or stomach pressure, yet people reported less upper-abdominal burning, bloating and fullness, and felt hungrier while fasting (Masuy 2024). The best current guess is that the oils calm the gut’s sensitivity and muscle tone rather than changing its speed, but the mechanism is not settled.

Evidence tier: randomised controlled trials in humans, moderate certainty (Cochrane 2023) — for the peppermint–caraway oil capsule only. For the kitchen spice or caraway tea: no trials.

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IBS, Bloating and Wind

Irritable bowel syndrome

For irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), the better-studied herbal option is peppermint oil on its own, covered on our peppermint for IBS and IBS herbal options pages. Caraway’s own IBS evidence is thin and comes in three pieces:

Sources: the poultice trial (Lauche 2015) is in the reference list below; the subgroup analysis is Madisch 2019 and the uncontrolled study is Linas 2026. We found no placebo-controlled trial of the oral peppermint–caraway combination run specifically in people diagnosed with IBS.

Bloating and wind

This is caraway’s oldest reputation and, for the tea and the seed, still an untested one: the EMA registration is traditional-use only, and we found no randomised trial of caraway tea or whole seeds for bloating or wind. The closest trial evidence is the fall in pressure, heaviness and fullness on the peppermint–caraway capsules. For most adults, a cup of caraway tea after a heavy meal is a reasonable, low-risk thing to try, as long as you know its support is centuries of use rather than trial data.

Evidence tier: one small open-label randomised trial (a topical poultice, confounded by heat); subgroup and uncontrolled data for the oral capsules; traditional use only for caraway tea and seeds.

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Weight and Blood Sugar: Thin Evidence

Weight: one small trial, published several times

The weight-loss claim traces back to a single randomised, placebo-controlled trial of 70 overweight or obese women in Iran who were already doing regular aerobic exercise. For 12 weeks they drank 30 mL a day either of a “caraway water” made by steam-distilling the seeds (1 kg of seed to 10 litres of liquid) or of a placebo water flavoured with caraway essence, without changing their diet or activity. Sixty women finished. Among them, the caraway group went from an average of 76.9 kg to 75.0 kg (about 1.9 kg lost), while the placebo group went from 72.0 kg to 72.8 kg. Body-fat percentage and waist measurements also fell in the caraway group; blood lipids and blood pressure did not change.

That is an interesting result, but a thin basis for “caraway melts belly fat” headlines:

The appetite report is Kazemipoor 2016. For approaches to weight that have much stronger evidence, see our Obesity page.

Evidence tier: a single small randomised trial (pilot-level), not replicated.

Blood sugar: rats only

We found no published human trial of caraway (Carum carvi) on blood sugar. The evidence behind the claim is animal work: in rats made diabetic with a drug that destroys insulin-producing cells, a water extract of caraway at 20 mg per kg of body weight lowered blood glucose after a single dose and nearly normalised it after two weeks of daily doses, without changing insulin levels; in normal rats it had no meaningful effect. A rat result is a reason to run a human trial, not a reason to change anyone’s diabetes treatment.

A trial often quoted as proof that “black caraway lowers blood sugar” — 60 overweight people with type 2 diabetes taking 1,000 mg twice a day for eight weeks, with lower fasting glucose and insulin resistance than on placebo — used Bunium persicum, a different plant (Jafari-Maskouni 2020). It says nothing direct about caraway. If you live with type 2 diabetes, caraway is a fine seasoning and nothing more.

Evidence tier: animal studies only, for caraway itself.

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What Animal and Lab Studies Suggest

Laboratory work can suggest how something might act, but it cannot tell you what happens when a person eats a spice. Here is what the caraway laboratory literature shows, labelled by type:

Sources: the rat gut study is Adam 2006; the laboratory-dish study is Iacobellis 2005; the diabetic-rat study is described in the previous section. Results in dishes and in rats often fail to carry over to people.

Evidence tier: animal and in vitro only.

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How People Use It: Seeds, Tea, Capsules and Oil

In food first

Whole seeds in cooking are the traditional, safest and most enjoyable form. A few practical tips:

Caraway tea

The EMA’s traditional-use monograph gives a dose for adults and adolescents: 0.5–2 g of crushed caraway in 150 mL of boiling water, one to three times a day. With USDA weighing a teaspoon of caraway at 2.1 g, that is roughly ¼ to 1 teaspoon per small cup. Crush the seeds just before brewing and pour on boiling water; covering the cup keeps the aromatic oil in, and about 10 minutes of steeping is a common kitchen choice before straining. The monograph advises seeing a doctor if symptoms last longer than two weeks, and it does not recommend the tea for children under 12 or in pregnancy or breastfeeding, because safety data are lacking.

Peppermint–caraway oil capsules

The capsules used in the dyspepsia trials contain 90 mg of peppermint oil and 50 mg of caraway oil under an enteric coating, taken one capsule twice a day for four weeks in the studies. Swallow them whole: the EU’s peppermint-oil monograph warns that breaking or chewing an enteric-coated capsule releases the oil early and can irritate the mouth and gullet (EMA: peppermint oil). These capsules are a treatment for indigestion that has already been diagnosed as functional dyspepsia. New indigestion after about age 60, unexplained weight loss, trouble swallowing, repeated vomiting, black stools or anaemia all need a medical assessment first, not a herbal capsule.

Caraway essential oil: a medicine, not a seasoning

Essential oil is caraway concentrated many times over. The EMA monograph’s adult dose by mouth is 0.15–0.3 mL of oil per day in total, split into one to three doses — a fraction of a millilitre, measured, from a product made for oral use. It is not recommended by mouth for anyone under 18, or in pregnancy or breastfeeding. For babies and children, the only traditional use of the oil that the EMA accepts is external: a 2% caraway-oil ointment rubbed thinly on the belly once a day, kept away from broken skin, the eyes and mucous membranes.

Why be this careful with a kitchen spice? The EMA’s own arithmetic (assessment report): the top oral dose of 0.3 mL, about 273 mg of oil, gives a 60-kg adult roughly 3 mg of carvone per kilogram per day — about five times the acceptable daily intake of 0.6 mg/kg that the European Food Safety Authority set for this form of carvone, based on liver-weight changes in rats. The EMA still judged the monograph dose acceptable because decades of medicinal use have produced no safety signal, and it noted that the dose from caraway tea is “most probably much lower”. Never swallow oil sold for diffusers or aromatherapy, and never give essential oil by mouth to a child.

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Myths and Overclaims in Popular Videos

Videos promising “7 health benefits of caraway seeds” or “surprising benefits beyond rye bread” usually mix one real finding with several borrowed ones. Here is how the common claims hold up:

What survives: caraway is a tasty, fibre-rich seasoning with a long and safe food history, and a peppermint–caraway oil capsule has reasonable evidence for functional dyspepsia. Almost everything else is tradition, rat data or someone else’s plant.

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Safety, Interactions and Who Should Avoid It

As a food

Caraway is “generally recognized as safe” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the EMA lists no known side effects for caraway tea. LactMed describes caraway as usually well tolerated, with side effects that are mainly digestive: heartburn, belching, wind and nausea.

Allergy: the carrot-family connection

The most important food risk is allergy, and it clusters. People who are allergic to celery are often sensitised to mugwort or birch pollen and react to several carrot-family spices, a pattern known as the celery–mugwort–spice syndrome. In a 1984 series of 31 people with celery allergy, 87% were sensitised to mugwort pollen, 52% also had carrot allergy, and 26% had a clinically relevant reaction to caraway (compared with 16% for parsley, 13% for fennel and 3% for aniseed). Within this syndrome, reactions to celery range from hives and itching in the mouth to anaphylactic shock (Wüthrich 1985). The EMA therefore lists allergy to other members of the family (fennel, anise, celery, coriander, dill) as a reason not to use caraway tea or oil, and adds mugwort and birch allergy for the tea. If you have celery, carrot or birch- or mugwort-pollen allergy, treat caraway (including in spice blends, breads and cheeses) with the same caution; see our Food Allergy page.

Skin reactions

Carvone, caraway’s main aroma compound, is a recognised but uncommon contact allergen. Among 24,124 North American patients patch-tested for suspected contact dermatitis between 2009 and 2018, 188 (0.78%) reacted to carvone; the commonest relevant source was personal-care products (46% of cases), followed by food (14%). Reports tied specifically to caraway are rare. If you know you react to carvone or to mint-flavoured toothpaste, be cautious with caraway oil on the skin, and follow the EMA’s advice to keep caraway-oil ointments off broken skin, the eyes and mucous membranes.

Pregnancy, breastfeeding and children

Gallbladder, liver and reflux

The EMA advises against medicinal caraway (tea or oil) in liver disease, inflammation of the bile ducts (cholangitis), gallstones or other biliary disorders, and in people with very low stomach acid (achlorhydria). The reasoning is physiological: in healthy volunteers, caraway oil completely stopped the gallbladder from emptying during testing. For the combination capsules, remember the peppermint half: the EMA’s peppermint-oil monograph notes that people with heartburn or a hiatus hernia sometimes find it worse, so anyone with reflux should stop if symptoms flare.

Interactions

Who should avoid medicinal caraway, or check first

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Key Research Papers

  1. May B, Kuntz HD, Kieser M, Köhler S (1996). Efficacy of a fixed peppermint oil/caraway oil combination in non-ulcer dyspepsia. Arzneimittel-Forschung. — PubMed PMID: 9006790
  2. Madisch A, Heydenreich CJ, Wieland V, Hufnagel R, Hotz J (1999). Treatment of functional dyspepsia with a fixed peppermint oil and caraway oil combination preparation as compared to cisapride. A multicenter, reference-controlled double-blind equivalence study. Arzneimittel-Forschung. — PubMed PMID: 10604046
  3. Freise J, Köhler S (1999). [Peppermint oil-caraway oil fixed combination in non-ulcer dyspepsia--comparison of the effects of enteric preparations] (in German). Die Pharmazie. — PubMed PMID: 10192108
  4. May B, Köhler S, Schneider B (2000). Efficacy and tolerability of a fixed combination of peppermint oil and caraway oil in patients suffering from functional dyspepsia. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics. — PubMed PMID: 11121917
  5. Chey WD, Lacy BE, Cash BD, Epstein M, Corsino PE, Shah SM (2019). A Novel, Duodenal-Release Formulation of a Combination of Caraway Oil and L-Menthol for the Treatment of Functional Dyspepsia: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology. — PubMed PMID: 30939487
  6. Li J, Lv L, Zhang J, Xu L, Zeng E, Zhang Z, et al. (2019). A Combination of Peppermint Oil and Caraway Oil for the Treatment of Functional Dyspepsia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. — PubMed PMID: 31827561
  7. Báez G, Vargas C, Arancibia M, Papuzinski C, Franco JV (2023). Non-Chinese herbal medicines for functional dyspepsia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. — PubMed PMID: 37323050
  8. Goerg KJ, Spilker T (2003). Effect of peppermint oil and caraway oil on gastrointestinal motility in healthy volunteers: a pharmacodynamic study using simultaneous determination of gastric and gall-bladder emptying and orocaecal transit time. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics. — PubMed PMID: 12562459
  9. Lauche R, Janzen A, Lüdtke R, Cramer H, Dobos G, Langhorst J (2015). Efficacy of Caraway Oil Poultices in Treating Irritable Bowel Syndrome--A Randomized Controlled Cross-Over Trial. Digestion. — PubMed PMID: 26044145
  10. Kazemipoor M, Radzi CW, Hajifaraji M, Haerian BS, Mosaddegh MH, Cordell GA (2013). Antiobesity effect of caraway extract on overweight and obese women: a randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. — PubMed PMID: 24319489
  11. Eddouks M, Lemhadri A, Michel JB (2004). Caraway and caper: potential anti-hyperglycaemic plants in diabetic rats. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 15261975
  12. Wüthrich B, Hofer T (1984). [Food allergy: the celery-mugwort-spice syndrome. Association with mango allergy?] (in German). Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift. — PubMed PMID: 6734454
  13. Warshaw EM, Shaver RL, DeKoven JG, Maibach HI, Taylor JS, Atwater AR, et al. (2022). Patch Testing to Carvone: North American Contact Dermatitis Group Experience, 2009 to 2018. Dermatitis. — PubMed PMID: 33867494
  14. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2006–; entry updated 2025). Caraway. Drugs and Lactation Database (LactMed). — PubMed PMID: 30000850

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Peppermint oil and caraway oil for functional dyspepsia
  2. PubMed: Caraway clinical trials
  3. PubMed: Celery–mugwort–spice allergy syndrome

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Connections

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