During the course of my research on herbal solutions for diabetes, I could not find any evidence of the role of cinnamon in reducing blood sugar. However, Cinnamomum tamala common name – tejpata or Malabar leaf is one of the plants listed in Ayurveda as an antidiabetic plant. Cinnamon too belongs to the Cinnamomum genus but it belongs to another species- zeylanicum.
The main medicinal action of Cinnamomum tamala plant is its ability to reduce blood sugar. Experiments on rats validate this property. The effect is comparable to the antidiabetic modern drug Glibenclamide (Chakraborty et al., 2010). These studies raise the likelihood of its probable use as an adjunct medicine for treating diabetes (Kumar et al., 2012).
The plant is also known to reduce cholesterol levels in rats (Dhulasawant et al., 2010; AL-Mamun et al., 2011)
But the species antidiabetic property has not been tested in human clinical trials. As such the evidence for this property of this species will at this stage be regarded to be not fully tested.
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