Our buying criteria for ginger are six short lines. This is the working behind them — what we checked, what we found, and one thing we assumed that turned out to be wrong. You do not need any of it to buy ginger. It is here because we would rather show it than ask you to take our word.
Whether the pungent compounds are still in it. Gingerols and shogaols are what ginger is taken for, and they are what the processing removes. Several things sold as ginger carry very little. Everything below is a way of answering that one question.
Steam distillation only lifts what evaporates. Gingerols and shogaols do not evaporate, so they stay behind in the plant. What comes over is the scent — zingiberene, citral and the rest of the volatile oil. Ginger essential oil therefore smells exactly like ginger while carrying almost none of what ginger is taken for. Those compounds end up in the oleoresin instead, the sticky fraction pulled out with solvent or carbon dioxide, where gingerols run 10 to 30 percent. This is why our second criterion asks a product to say plainly which preparation it is. Essential oil is the extreme case, and it fails on chemistry rather than on quality.
Fresh ginger is higher in gingerols. Dried and heated ginger is higher in shogaols, because drying turns one into the other. Neither is a weaker version of the other. That is why the page tells you which form to use for what, rather than treating a jar of powder as root with the water taken out.
We looked at twelve ginger capsule and extract products on sale in August 2026. Four state a gingerol figure at all — three at 5 percent, one at 10 percent. The other eight print a milligram weight of root and nothing about what is inside it, which tells you how much powder you swallowed and not how much of the working compound came with it. One of the twelve published a certificate we could open and read against a named batch: 71.6 milligrams of gingerols and shogaols per capsule, against its own stated minimum of 50. The rest either claim testing without showing it, or keep the certificate behind a batch number printed on the bottle you have not bought yet.
We went in expecting supermarket ginger tea to be mostly lemongrass, lemon peel and licorice with ginger low on the list. An earlier draft of these buying rules said so outright. So we read thirteen ingredient panels in August 2026. Eight of the thirteen list ginger first. The assumption was wrong and we dropped it. What survived the check is narrower and still worth knowing: two put ginger behind lemongrass, one carries the word Ginger in the product name and lists actual ginger root seventh of ten ingredients — behind lemongrass, lemon peel, cinnamon and a ginger flavoring — and one fruit tea lists it last of seven. The panel is worth reading. It just usually says the right thing.
Of four checked, two list cane sugar as the first ingredient and two list ginger. The wider point is the spread. Independent testing found gingerols and shogaols running from 0.85 milligrams to 41.7 milligrams per daily serving across ginger products, with the chews at the bottom of that range. The same word is on the front of every one of them.
In one round of testing, two ginger supplements held 34 percent and 66 percent of the ginger their labels claimed. One product went over a limit for lead. Of four ginger spices tested, one carried three to four times the lead of the others, and another held 88 percent of the gingerols and shogaols it should have.
This is the most asked question about ginger and the usual answer is yes. Our page does not mention travel sickness at all. Here is the working. Six controlled trials, split three against three — and the split is not random, because it follows what each one measured. Ginger moved the stomach: vomiting and cold sweating in eighty naval cadets in heavy seas on one gram (1988), and the worst of the nausea plus the time before nausea began, on one and two grams under a rotating drum (2003). Ginger did not move the ear: in thirty-eight people on one gram there was no change in the eye reflex the inner ear drives, while the travel-sickness drug tested alongside it did change that reflex (1989); twenty-eight people in a rotating chair on half a gram, one gram of powder or one gram of fresh root got no protection at all, where the drug they were compared against bought 147.5 more head movements before sickness, and the authors concluded ginger has no anti-motion-sickness activity (1991); and three doses sat at dummy-capsule level in a second 1988 comparison against the same drug.
Motion sickness begins in the inner ear. Ginger works in the stomach. It can quiet the stomach end of it — the retching, the sweating, the sickness itself — and in one trial it delayed the onset. What it does not appear to do is make you less likely to become sick in the first place. The drugs do that, and they do it by acting on the brain, which is why they make you drowsy. This is the same fact that is already on the ginger page, read from the other side. Ginger acting in the stomach and not the brain is why it suits the sickness of pregnancy and why it does not make you sleepy. It is also why it is at its weakest against a problem that starts in the ear. We could have written that ginger may help travel sickness and been in the same place as everyone else. We would rather leave it off the page and put the reason here.
Because the buying section is how we chose, not homework for you. The page says to get the botanical name right, to know which preparation you are holding, to prefer a product that states its gingerol content, to avoid undisclosed extras, to buy it firm and sealed, and to want it independently tested. This is what we do when we apply that. And when we find we had something wrong, as we did on the tea, this is where it gets said.
We have no product of our own and take no payment for a place on a list. Where a figure below is not ours, the source is named so you can check it yourself.