Summary

Chamomile is the herb almost everyone already has in the cupboard, and it earns its place several times over. It relaxes the gut muscle that grips and cramps, and it helps trapped wind to move on. It has a calming effect too, which matters because stress affects digestion directly. And there is fibre in the flowers that feeds your gut bacteria. It is gentle enough that official European guidance sets out doses for babies from six months old. This article covers what it does and what is inside the flower. It also covers how to make the tea properly, because most people are throwing most of it away.

Key takeaways

• Chamomile relaxes the muscle in your gut wall, which is why it eases cramping and griping rather than only tasting nice.
• It is both a gentle bitter and an aromatic, so it works before a meal or after it, for different reasons.
• A cup delivers a small amount of the same fibre that is sold in tubs as a prebiotic.
• European guidance gives chamomile tea doses for children from six months old, which tells you a great deal about this plant.
• Most people use too little, leave the cup uncovered, and drink one a day instead of three. Fix those and it is a different herb.

Introduction

You finish a meal and something is not right. Fullness that stays longer than it should, trapped wind that will not move, or a griping discomfort low down. Chamomile is one of the first herbs people come to for this, and they are right to.

What most people do not know is how much it is doing, and how much of it they lose in the making. This is a plant with real effects on your gut wall. An infusion made properly is a different thing altogether from a teabag dunked for ninety seconds.

A plant that has never gone out of use

Chamomile is one of the most used medicinal plants in Europe and has been for as long as anyone has been writing things down. Egyptian, Greek and Roman writers all recorded it for digestion. Every village tradition across the continent kept hold of it. And it reached the modern supermarket more or less intact, which almost no other medicinal herb has managed.

Its proper name carries its own history. Chamomile’s botanical name is Matricaria, which comes from the Latin word for womb. It was named that because of how long women had been using it for cramping and period pain. The plant’s own name is a record of what it was used for.

Then there is who it is safe for. In the UK, herbs used the same way for long enough can be registered as traditional medicines. Official European guidance then sets out what they are for and how much to take. For chamomile, that guidance covers children from six months old. It starts at half a teaspoon of dried flowers, two to four times a day, and goes up with age. Below six months it says only that it has not been looked at. The reason it gives is about how much fluid a small baby should have, not about the herb. So this is what has been given for colicky babies and fretful toddlers for centuries, and the modern guidance has not moved away from it. Very few remedies of any kind can be described that way.

Two types are sold. German chamomile is what you will almost always find in the shops, and it is the one most of the research uses. Roman chamomile is more of a garden plant here in the UK. They work on digestion in much the same way, and where something applies to only one of them, I have said so.

What it does once you drink it

Chamomile’s main job in your gut is on the muscle in the gut wall. That is muscle you have no control over, working away on its own, and when it tightens and grips you feel it as cramping.

Researchers tested chamomile on gut muscle from rats, guinea pigs and humans, using muscle that had already been made to tighten. Chamomile relaxed it, and kept it relaxed. So when your gut is gripping, chamomile works on the thing doing the gripping. The relief feels like letting go rather than something being dulled down. The researchers called their paper “Evidence supports tradition”, which is a fair summary of what they found.

Chamomile is also what herbalists call a carminative. That is the old word for a herb that helps trapped wind to move on instead of staying put and building up pressure. It is the reason a cup after dinner became such a habit, and it is why chamomile suits the heaviness and bloating that come on after eating.

All of this is well enough established that chamomile is a registered traditional medicine here. The official wording approved for those registered products reads: “Traditional herbal medicinal product used for the symptomatic treatment of minor gastro-intestinal complaints such as bloating and minor spasms.” If you have ever read the small print on a box of chamomile and wondered what it was telling you, that is it.

There is an anti-inflammatory effect too, and laboratory work has now traced how it happens. Chamomile’s oils calmed several of the signals that drive inflammation, by turning down a switch inside your cells that controls the whole inflammatory response. Herbalists have described chamomile as anti-inflammatory for centuries. That work shows how it happens.

What is inside the flower

For something so small and plain looking, chamomile is doing a lot chemically, and one part of it is properly beautiful.

Chamomile’s essential oil is blue. Not a hint of blue, but a deep inky blue that surprises people the first time they see a bottle. And the odd thing is that the colour is not in the flower at all. The compound that makes it, chamazulene, does not exist in the growing plant. It forms under heat while the oil is being steam distilled, out of one of the sesquiterpenes. That is the same family of compounds behind chamomile’s bitter edge. So the colour is created during distillation, out of the part of the plant you can taste.

The other compound worth naming is apigenin, which is the best studied of chamomile’s plant compounds and comes up again further down. You can now buy apigenin on its own as a supplement. Apigenin is not chamomile. What a cup gives you is the whole flower in water, hundreds of compounds at once. That is a different thing from any one of them alone.

Both a bitter and an aromatic, which is unusual

Chamomile does two jobs at once, and that is a large part of why it has stayed in use for so long.

Make a strong infusion and you can taste both. The floral quality with its hint of apples comes first, and underneath it there is a mild bitterness. That bitterness is not incidental. Bitter taste on your tongue sets off a reflex that gets your saliva, stomach acid and bile going. That is how your body prepares to digest a meal. The post on bitter herbs and autumn digestion covers that reflex properly. Chamomile is a gentle bitter rather than a fierce one like gentian, so it does the job less forcefully. But it does do it.

Then the aromatic side works lower down, on the muscle and the lining of your gut, which is where the cramping and the trapped wind are eased.

That gentleness is also why chamomile suits people who cannot take a strong bitter at all. Gentian, given to someone with gastritis or reflux, will usually make things worse. Chamomile’s bitterness is mild, and its anti-inflammatory side pulls in the opposite direction.

The practical upshot is that your timing is flexible, which it would not be with a strong bitter. A cup ten to fifteen minutes before a meal uses the bitter side. That suits you if your appetite has dropped, or if eating has started to feel like hard work. A cup during or after uses everything else, and suits fullness, wind and griping. Most people come to chamomile for the second of those, but the first is there if you want it.

It feeds your gut bacteria as well

This is the part of chamomile that almost nobody mentions.

When researchers looked at what is actually dissolved in a cup of chamomile tea, they found fibre that your own body cannot digest. One of them is inulin, the same fibre sold in tubs as a prebiotic. Fibre like this passes through your small intestine untouched and arrives in your large intestine, where your gut bacteria feed on it. So your cup is delivering a little food for your bacteria alongside everything else, which is not what most people think they are drinking.

What those bacteria then do with it has been tested using a laboratory version of the human bowel, set up with samples from people with IBS. Over eight days, a herbal mix containing chamomile increased the substances your bowel lining uses as fuel. It also increased several helpful groups of bacteria, including the bifidobacteria you see named on probiotic tubs. Chamomile shared that mix with two other herbs, so it cannot take all the credit.

A cup of chamomile feeds your gut bacteria in a way tea or coffee does not. That is on top of everything else it is doing.

Stress, and why your gut feels it

Stress affects your digestion directly, which is why a difficult week is so often felt in your gut before anywhere else. Chamomile works on your nervous system as well as on your gut, and that is a large part of why it suits gut trouble that flares when life does.

Apigenin, that compound from earlier, attaches to the same landing sites in your brain that calming medicines such as diazepam work on. It is nothing like as strong, and chamomile is not a sedative. But the calm people describe after a cup has a route, and this is it.

In people, a trial gave a concentrated chamomile extract to people with moderate to severe anxiety. Those who stayed on it kept lower anxiety scores than those switched onto a placebo, across six months, and had no trouble tolerating it. A later review of ten trials found nine of them concluded chamomile reduced anxiety.

That trial used a concentrated extract rather than tea, and the useful lesson from it is about quantity. Chamomile does more when you use more of it. Which brings us to the part most people get wrong.

Most people make the tea badly

This is where the benefit is won or lost, and it is the most common reason a patient tells me chamomile did nothing for her.

Use enough. One to two tablespoons of dried flowers per cup, or one good teabag. That is a great deal more than most people put in.

Boiling water, and put a lid on it. The lid matters more than the temperature does. Most of chamomile’s activity is in its oils, and those oils leave with the steam. Brew it uncovered and you lose a good part of what you are brewing for. A saucer over the cup is enough.

Give it five to ten minutes, still covered.

Drink it more than once. The traditional amount is a small cup, three or four times a day. Most people have one, at bedtime, and decide chamomile is mild. It is not mild. You are simply not using enough of it.

Buy whole flower heads rather than dust where you can, and then use your nose. Good chamomile smells strongly of apples the moment you open the packet. If it smells of very little, the oils have gone, and no amount of careful brewing will bring them back.

The few times to check first

Chamomile is in the daisy family, so if you react to daisies, ragweed or chrysanthemums, leave it alone. Reactions are rare. A review of 72 trials covering nearly 2,900 people found no allergic reactions at all. The few effects that did appear were minor and cleared on their own. Serious reactions have been reported outside trials, so a known daisy family allergy is the one thing that applies to everybody.

The other is medication. As a precaution, chamomile is not taken alongside warfarin, aspirin or other medicines that thin the blood. And because of the way apigenin works in the brain, it is not taken alongside diazepam or similar. Medical herbalists are trained to know what goes safely with what. So if you take prescribed medication and want chamomile every day rather than now and then, that is a short conversation worth having.

Where this leaves you

Chamomile relaxes the gut muscle that grips, moves trapped wind along, calms your nervous system, and feeds your gut bacteria. It has a name that records what women used it for, and a safety record that covers babies from six months old. That is a lot from a small white flower you can buy in any supermarket.

If it has never seemed to do much for you, the odds are strongly on the way you are making it rather than on the plant. More flowers, a lid, and more than one cup a day.

And if discomfort after eating has stopped being occasional and turned into the pattern, chamomile is a good thing to have while you figure out the rest. Something started it, and that part may take a full case history to find.