Fenugreek

Fenugreek: what was it used for?

Softening and soothing, inside and out. Dioscorides made the flour a poultice with honey for inflammation, a plaster with saltpetre and vinegar for the spleen, a bath for women’s complaints, and a wash for dandruff. Grieve gives the mucilage for inflamed stomach and intestines and as a poultice for abscesses, boils, and carbuncles, and records the Egyptian helba, seeds soaked into a thick paste, “Said to be equal to quinine in preventing fevers; is comforting to the stomach and has been utilized for diabetes.” She proposed it as a cheap substitute for cod-liver oil in rickets, anaemia, and debility.

Fenugreek: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the seed as a traditional herbal medicine, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” for temporary loss of appetite and, applied to the skin, for minor skin inflammation (monograph of 2021). Its assessment report finds the seed rich in mucilage, galactomannans making up 25 to 45 per cent, with trigonelline, saponins derived from diosgenin, and about 30 per cent protein. Grieve’s note on diabetes has been tested: a 2023 meta-analysis of ten trials in 706 people with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes found that fenugreek significantly reduced fasting and after-meal blood sugar and HbA1c. Other claims fare worse: a 2026 meta-analysis found the evidence for raising testosterone in men “very uncertain,” and that it “does not support clinical or commercial testosterone-boosting claims,” and a review of period pain found the effect “highly uncertain.”

Fenugreek: what did the older authorities say?

Dioscorides

Fenugreek meal is softening and dispersing; pounded with boiled honey it helps inflammation within and without; its decoction serves for straining at stool or urine and for the stinking looseness of dysentery, and its cream, boiled in water and strained, cleans the hair of dandruff and scaly scalps. The Latins, he notes, call it foenumgraecum, and the Egyptians itasin.

Mrs. M. Grieve

The seeds “were held in high repute among the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans for medicinal and culinary purposes.” In her own day they were ground into curry and into condition powders for horses and cattle, “the principal ingredient in most of the quack nostrums which find so much favour among grooms and horsekeepers,” and used to make damaged hay palatable.