39. Cinnamon | The Spice That Was Once Worth More Than Gold

In this episode of Mohivate, Dr Mohi Sarawgee explores the remarkable story of cinnamon and its connection with metabolic health.
For more than 4,000 years, cinnamon has appeared in ancient Egyptian tombs, Roman history, the Bible, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Traders invented elaborate myths to protect it. Entire empires fought over it. At its peak, it was worth more than gold.
Today, it sits  in kitchen cupboards around the world.
But what exactly is cinnamon? And why has modern science only recently started catching up?

In this episode, we explore the history, mythology, and science behind one of the world’s most famous spices. From giant bird nests and snake-guarded valleys to blood sugar, cholesterol, insulin sensitivity, and metabolic health, we follow cinnamon’s extraordinary journey across centuries and continents.

We discuss the difference between Ceylon and cassia cinnamon, what current research tells us about blood sugar control and cholesterol, the potential benefits and limitations of cinnamon supplementation, and the practical questions worth knowing before adding it to your daily routine.

This is a story about trade, medicine, mythology, curiosity, and the remarkable journey of a spice that has fascinated humanity for thousands of years.

Because sometimes the most ordinary things have the most extraordinary histories.

REFERENCES

1.Crawford P. Effectiveness of cinnamon for lowering hemoglobin A1C in patients with type 2 diabetes: a randomized, controlled trial. J Am Board Fam Med, 2009.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19734396/
2.Cinnamon supplements may affect medication metabolism — University of Mississippi research, ScienceDaily.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250424165657.htm
3.The effects of cinnamon on patients with metabolic diseases: an umbrella review of meta-analyses, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2025.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12620228/
4.Orally administered cinnamon extract reduces β-amyloid oligomerization and corrects cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease animal models, PLOS ONE, 2011.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030596/
5.Coumarin levels in Ceylon vs cassia cinnamon — assessment in ground cinnamon, PMC.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3385612/

Just a gentle reminder: this episode is for information, education, and inspiration only. It’s not a substitute for your doctor’s advice. For any personal health concerns, always seek guidance from your doctor.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi everyone, welcome back to Mohivate. I'm Dr. Mohi Saraugi, a GP by profession, but here I'm swapping prescriptions for perspective. The solstice just passed this weekend, the longest day of the year, and it turns out almost the entire world marks it in some way. Bonfires in Scandinavia and the Baltics, sunrise gatherings at Stonehenge, ancient Yang and fire rituals in Chinese tradition, even a baseball game played at midnight under natural daylight in Fairbanks, Alaska. It's quite beautiful, really. Almost everyone, everywhere, pauses for this day in some form. And as it happens, June 21st is also International Yoga Day. And that is not a coincidence. The date was chosen specifically because it is the solstice. In yogic tradition, it is widely believed that this was the day Lord Shiva, considered the first yogi, turned south and began transmitting the knowledge of yoga to the seven sages. Which means June 21st is at the very same time the astronomical peak of the year and symbolically the moment yoga itself is said to have been born. I had the most special session taught by my yoga teacher. Starting very early, we practiced a natural, free-flowing sequence curated in combination with Yin Yoga, and the most powerful meditation and breathing practice, what I can only describe as completely transporting, and then a very heartwarming intention setting and letter writing exercise to ourselves, which she's going to post back to us in autumn. I cannot wait to see how the next few months unfold. I have to say, I love how differently various cultures have taken up yoga. Growing up in India, I was honestly often quite averse to it. A lot of the time, it felt like a physical education session and instructor counting. Most of us rushing through it without paying attention to form, to breadth, to coordination. Sometimes even quietly competing with each other over who was more flexible, missing the entire point. But now I absolutely love it. And there's just something about sun salutations done on a solstice, it adds a certain beauty to it. I had never thought about the summer solstice that way before. And it wasn't just women in the room, by the way. Every gender, however anyone identifies, was there absorbing something rather beautiful together. Now, a little while ago, we started a series here on Mohivate on metabolic health and metabolic supplements. We began with berberine and I promised we would keep working through the rest of that cabinet. Today it's cinnamon's turn. The unassuming thing in your spice rack, the one most of us forget about for the rest of the year. Except cinnamon has a past, a wild one. Wars were fought over it, empires burned it, and for a very long time, ounce for ounce, it was worth more than gold. And it is now sitting at the center of a genuinely interesting modern science story. I promise you, by the end of this episode, you will never look at that little jar the same way again. So let's begin. Cinnamon has been used for over 4,000 years, and for most of that time, almost nobody who used it knew where it actually came from. It appears in the Bible, in ancient Egyptian texts, in Roman history. The ancient Egyptians used it in embalming rituals and temple offerings, believing it helped people prepare the soul for the afterlife. It was considered precious enough to be placed inside the tombs of pharaohs alongside them. In the Hebrew Bible, cinnamon is named as a key ingredient in holy anointing oil. It was considered equal in value to gold and ivory, a gift suitable for monarchs and for gods. The Romans used it lavishly in food and in incense. And there is one story in particular that tells you everything you need to know about how valuable this spice once was. It involves the Roman emperor Nero. And if you do not know much about him, let me give you the brief, slightly alarming version. Nero is, by most historical accounts, one of the most brutal and eccentric rulers Rome ever produced. He is widely believed to have had his own mother killed, his stepbrother, at least one wife, possibly two. He persecuted Christians, reportedly blaming them for a fire that devastated Rome, partly so he could clear land for an enormous vanity project called the Golden House. Complete, according to some accounts, with a revolving dining room. One of the wives historians believe he had killed was his first, Octavia. He had fallen in love with someone else, a noblewoman named Poppia Sabina, and Octavia was simply in the way. When Poppia herself later died, Nero is said to have burned what amounted to an entire year's supply of cinnamon at her funeral as a display of grief and quite transparently as a display of wealth, which does make you wonder, was that grief genuine or guilt? Given what it apparently took to get her in the first place, I think we are allowed to ask the question. At its most expensive, cinnamon traded at around 15 times the price of silver. In some markets, ounce for ounce, it traded directly for gold. You do not burn a year's supply of something cheap. For most of this history, the people actually buying cinnamon in Europe and the Middle East had absolutely no idea where it grew. Arab traders controlled the spice roots for centuries and they protected that monopoly the way any good business protects a trade secret. They made up stories. One of the most elaborate comes from the Greek historian Herodotus. He claimed cinnamon sticks were gathered by giant birds who used them to build nests on impossibly high cliffs. Traders couldn't reach the nests, so instead they left out big chunks of meat. The birds, apparently not very bright, would carry the meat up to their nests. The nests, unable to bear the weight, would collapse, sending the cinnamon sticks tumbling down to be collected. It is genuinely one of the most elaborate excuses for a high price ever recorded in human history. Sorry about the cost, it's the bird nests. Another version had cinnamon growing in deep valleys guarded by venomous snakes. A French nobleman travelling with the king during the crusades was even told that cinnamon was fished out of the Nile with nets at the very edge of the known world. None of it was true. The real source was the island now known as Sri Lanka. It went by other names through history. The ancient Greeks and Romans called it Taprobane. Arab traders called it Serendib, and later, under colonial rule, it became known as Celon, the name still used today for true cinnamon. The tree was there all along, growing quietly in lush forests. But the myths did their job for centuries. The Arabs held the monopoly until the 1500s when Portuguese traders finally found their way there and the secret was out. And once the secret was out, cinnamon became one of the driving forces behind the age of exploration. The same hunger for spice roots that sent Vasco da Gama and Columbus across oceans. The Portuguese found Ceylon, conquered it, and controlled the cinnamon trade for over a century. Then the Dutch defeated the Portuguese. Then in 1796, the British defeated the Dutch. At which point, in fairness, the British were simply doing what the British did to most things they encountered for the next century. Entire empires rose and fell, in part, over the bark of a tree. All of that for something you can now buy in a supermarket for less than the price of a coffee. Now let's understand what cinnamon actually is. Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of trees in the Cinnamon family. There are two main types worth knowing. The first, Ceylon cinnamon. The true cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka. It is softer, more delicate, and curls into the thin, tightly lead quills you sometimes see sold as a premium product. It has a slightly floral flavor and a soft bark you can practically crumble with your fingers. The second is cassia cinnamon, mostly grown in China and Indonesia, with a stronger, spicier flavor. It is cheaper, easier to grow, and far more widely available. If you have bought a jar of brown cinnamon from a regular supermarket, there is a strong chance it is cassia, simply labeled cinnamon, with no mention of the difference anywhere on the jar. This is exactly why you'll see people on social media specifically hunting down Ceylon cinnamon. And there is a reason this distinction matters beyond flavor. Both varieties contain a natural compound called comarin. In small amounts, coamarin is harmless. In large amounts, taken regularly over time, it can be hard on the liver. And the two cinnamons are not equal here. Ceylon cinnamon contains roughly 0.017 mg of coamarin per teaspoon. Cassia contains somewhere between 7 and 18 mg per teaspoon, several hundred times more depending on the batch. So if you have started adding a generous spoonful of cinnamon to your porridge every single morning because you read somewhere that it's good for you, it is worth knowing which cinnamon is actually in that jar. A sprinkle here and there, almost certainly fine, whichever type you have. A heaped teaspoon daily for months of cassia specifically, that is where you would want to pay attention. I promise this is the only homework in this episode. Go and look at the label. If it just says cinnamon with no species mentioned, it is most likely cassia. Now, while cinnamon was sparking wars in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, it had an entirely separate life unfolding in Indian and Chinese medicine. And this is where the metabolic story actually begins to take shape. Centuries before anyone had heard the word insulin. In Ayurveda, cinnamon is classified as a warming spice, traditionally used to stimulate what is called Agni digestive fire. Practitioners used it to ease bloating, improve appetite, support circulation, and specifically, even in those times, to help balance blood sugar. In traditional Chinese medicine, cinnamon, bark, and twig have been used for well over a thousand years to class as a warming herb used to improve circulation and support the body through cold weather. And it turns out across the world, completely unconnected medical traditions kept independently arriving at the same plant for similar reasons. That's usually enough to make scientists ask better questions. It just took modern science a few thousand years to catch up and ask why. Which brings us to the modern mechanistic version of that very old observation. It begins properly in the 1990s when a researcher at the US Department of Agriculture noticed that compounds in a cinnamon appear to improve how fat cells responded to insulin. The active compounds responsible are polyphenols, primarily cinnamoldehyde, the molecule that gives cinnamon its distinctive smell, along with compounds called type A prosynodines. The proposed mechanism suggests cinnamon improves insulin receptor sensitivity, increases the expression of a glucose transporter called GLUT4, which pulls glucose out of the bloodstream and into your cells and may act on certain pathways similar to a class of diabetes medications called thiazolidine dions, drugs that work by improving how the body's cell respond to insulin. Multiple clinical trials have looked at cinnamon's effect on people with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. A 2024 updated systematic review and meta-analysis, pooling 24 randomized control trials, found that cinnamon supplementation produced statistically significant reductions in fasting blood sugar, insulin resistance, and HBA1C in people with type 2 diabetes. A separate 2025 umbrella review of meta-analysis confirmed improvements in fasting glucose and lipid profiles with the most pronounced effects in people who already had diabetes or metabolic syndrome and noted that higher doses above 1.5 grams a day taken for shorter periods of around 2 months seemed to work best. One particular trial is worth naming specifically, the Crawford 2009 trial. 109 patients with type 2 diabetes were given 1 gram of cinnamon daily for 90 days alongside their usual diabetes care. HBA1C dropped by 0.83% in the cinnamon group compared with 0.37% in the usual care control group. The paper notes that a drop of this size is comparable to reductions seen with some prescription diabetes medications and would be expected to meaningfully lower the risk of diabetic complications, retinopathy, neuropathy, and nephropathy over time. But I want to be properly honest with you here because this is not a clean, unanimous result across the board. Not every trial agrees. Some show smaller effects, some show none at all, and reviewers consistently point out that the studies vary widely in dose, duration, and which type of cinnamon was actually used. So the honest summary is this cinnamon appears to have a real, measurable effect on blood sugar in a meaningful number of studies. It is not a replacement for diabetes medication and it is not going to undo a lifetime of cake. But as a low-risk, low-cost addition, alongside everything else you are already doing, the evidence is more promising than I expected when I started looking into this. Biologically plausible, backed by real trials, but not yet strong enough for a formal clinical recommendation on its own. And blood sugar is not the only place cinnamon shows up in the research. There is a second, fairly consistent thread around cholesterol and triglycerides. A meta-analysis pooling 16 studies and over a thousand people with type 2 diabetes found cinnamon significantly lowered triglycerides, total cholesterol and LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol. Interestingly, the effect on LDL seemed to be dose-dependent. Lower amounts showed a real benefit, higher amounts did not, which is a useful reminder that with cinnamon, more is not automatically better. So between the blood sugar story and the cholesterol story, you have two separate, reasonably consistent threads of evidence, both pointing in a similar direction. And I would say it is a genuinely interesting spice, doing rather more than just sitting on top of your porridge looking decorative. Now, because I'm technically a doctor, here is a practical safety section. Some recent research has looked at whether cinnamon can interfere with medications, and the honest answer is in supplement form, possibly. The compound responsible is cinnamaldehyde. Lab studies suggest it can block a specific liver enzyme involved in clearing certain drugs from your system. Nicotine and a cancer medication called letrozol are the two best studied examples, which in theory could affect how those drugs behave in your body. Interestingly, when researchers actually tested this directly in people rather than in a lab dish, the real-world effect turned out to be far less significant than predicted. Cinnamaldehyde is broken down by the body very quickly before it gets the chance to meaningfully affect the liver. But this matters far more for concentrated cinnamon supplements, capsules, and high-dose extracts than it does for a sprinkle on your porridge or your toast. You would need to be taking several tablespoons a day consistently to get anywhere near a concerning dose from food alone. The other consideration is coomarin again, which alongside the liver point we already discussed also has a mild blood thinning effect. If you're on anticoagulant medication or if you have a liver condition, it is worth being a little more cautious with cinnamon supplements specifically and mentioning it to your doctor if you're taking them on a daily basis. It is also worth saying cinnamon supplements seem to be the new turmeric. First, everyone was taking turmeric capsules for everything. Now, cinnamon is having its moment. The same general rule applies. Food is one thing. Concentrated capsules are a different category entirely. And if you're pregnant, cinnamon in normal food amounts, the sort you would use in cooking or baking, is generally considered fine. Concentrated supplements, capsules and extracts, are a different category and worth checking with your midwife or doctor first if you're already taking them. Particularly given how the conversation around gestational diabetes continues to grow. And despite what the internet may have told you, cinnamon tea is not a reliable way to bring on labor. Please don't try that one expecting results. And on that note, in Ayurveda, a common recommendation is to soak a stick of cinnamon in water overnight and drink that water first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. The idea being that it supports fasting blood sugar through the day. I cannot point you to a dedicated clinical trial testing that exact preparation because the research we have looked at has only used cinnamon powder or capsules, not infused water specifically. But in my perspective, given everything we now know about cinnamon's actual mechanisms, it is a plausible, low-risk thing to try if you're curious. Just don't expect it to outperform the dose studies we have already discussed. There is one more area of cinnamon research worth mentioning, mostly because it is genuinely exciting, even though it comes with a fairly large asterisk. Lab and animal studies have found that compounds in cinnamon may help reduce the clumping of a protein called beta-amyloid, which is closely linked to Alzheimer's disease. Some animal studies have shown improvements in memory and cognitive function as well. This is still very much early stage science. We are talking about cells in dishes and mice in labs, not proven results in people. But it is an active area of research, and one of the more interesting reasons cinnamon keeps showing up in scientific journals well beyond the diabetes literature. If you go looking in a year or two and find more on this, you heard it here first with the appropriate amount of watch this space. So where does this leave us practically? A small amount of cinnamon stirred into porridge, coffee, a curry or baking, a cinnamon bun, if that's your thing, it isn't really mine, is a perfectly pleasant thing to keep doing. You have centuries of tradition behind it and a growing pile of modern evidence that it is doing something beyond just tasting good. And if you want to be slightly more precise about it, Ceylon cinnamon is the gentler choice for daily use, particularly if daily really does mean every single day. As a formal supplement for blood sugar management specifically, the evidence is promising, but not yet strong enough to replace anything your doctor has prescribed. And maybe that is the nicest thing about this whole story. A bark that was once worth more than gold, a spice, an entire civilization told elaborate lies about. Giant birds, snake-guarded valleys to protect its price, a flavor that funerals were built around and that quietly reshaped the map of the world. And it turned out to be, in the end, just bark. Ordinary tree bark dried and rolled into a curl. And yet here we are, 4,000 years later, still reaching for it, still finding new reasons, it might be good for our health. Some of you still keeping a jar of it within arm's reach of the kettle. And either way, the next time that little jar is sitting in your cupboard, I hope you think just for a second about empires that rose and fell over it. I hope something today gave you a small piece of trivia to share at dinner, a reason to be slightly more impressed with your spice track or simply a few minutes of something easy on a long week. Thank you for listening. I'm Dr. Mohi. Until next time, remember this not everything valuable begins with certainty. Sometimes we discover its meaning first and its explanation later. And every so often, that journey brings us a little closer to coming home to ourselves.