Educational information, not medical advice — ask your doctor or midwife.
Cabbage is a common leafy vegetable, the plant Brassica oleracea. It is called couve in Portuguese and col in Spanish. People eat it raw, cooked, or fermented as sauerkraut.
European folk practice also put it on the body. Cooled leaves were bound over sore joints, swollen legs and full breasts. Long use is not proof that a remedy works, and it is not proof that it is safe.
The short verdict: as a food, cabbage is cheap, safe nutrition for most people. As a remedy, the human evidence is thin and comes from small studies.
The best studied use is a cabbage leaf wrap for breast pain during breastfeeding. Even there, a cold cloth seems to do much the same job.
Nobody really knows why a cabbage leaf wrap eases a swollen, painful breast.
One idea is simple cooling. In trials, a chilled gel pack works about as well as a cabbage leaf. That points to temperature and gentle pressure, not to the plant.
Cabbage holds glucosinolates, which are sulfur compounds. In cell and animal studies, their breakdown products appear to damp down inflammation signals. Whether eating cabbage does this inside your body is not established.
Some people believe compounds seep from the leaf through the skin. This has not been shown in people. The leaf may simply hold cold against the skin.
Raw cabbage juice was once said to heal stomach ulcers. That idea came from small, uncontrolled reports in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern research has not confirmed it.
What is solid is the nutrition. Cabbage gives you vitamin C, vitamin K and fibre, and those effects are well established in people.
Most people meet cabbage as plain food. These are the usual forms:
Fresh raw leaves, shredded into salads and slaws.
Cooked cabbage, boiled, steamed, braised or roasted.
Fermented cabbage, such as sauerkraut and kimchi. These are high in salt.
Raw cabbage juice, pressed at home or sold chilled.
Chilled whole leaves, used as a wrap over a sore breast or knee.
Capsules and powders made from dried cabbage or cabbage extract. These are sold as supplements and are not standardised.
For wraps, people usually use the large outer leaves, washed, chilled and softened by crushing the thick rib.
Cabbage is one of the oldest cultivated vegetables in Europe. Roman writers praised it in extravagant terms. Cato the Elder listed it for wounds, joints and digestion.
Medieval and later European folk healers bound bruised leaves over swellings, burns, ulcers on the leg, and aching joints.
Midwives and nursing mothers across Europe used cooled leaves on full, painful breasts. The practice was also used to help dry up milk at weaning.
In the mid twentieth century, a doctor reported that raw cabbage juice sped up stomach ulcer healing. The reports were uncontrolled and were never reliably repeated.
In Portuguese and Spanish kitchens, couve and col stayed daily food more than medicine. The remedy use sat alongside the plate, not instead of it.
Stop and get medical advice if things do not settle.
See a doctor the same day if a breast becomes red, hot and painful, or you get a fever. That suggests mastitis and may need antibiotics.
See a doctor if your knee pain is getting worse, the joint locks, or it is hot and swollen.
Get urgent care for black or tarry stools, vomiting blood, or severe stomach pain. Those are signs of a bleeding ulcer.
Stop the wraps and see a doctor if the skin under them blisters, breaks or spreads redness.
Cabbage is an ordinary food and is sold freely worldwide. Cabbage capsules and powders are regulated as food supplements in the UK and EU, and as dietary supplements in the US. No medicines regulator has approved cabbage to treat any condition.
Evidence grades and traditional-use labels are explained in our methodology. Nothing here is medical advice.
What it is typically used for, usual dose, cautions, and the study behind it where real trial data exists.
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