Does ginger ale really help with stomach aches? - Big Questions - (Ep. 44) | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm Craig. I just drank a bucket of ginger ale and this is Mental Floss on YouTube

Today I'm gonna answer Kevin's big question, does ginger ale really help with stomach aches

Well, not for me right now. I just drank a lot of ginger ale. You shouldn't drink a bucket of anything really, Kevin

So there are a few things going on here that can affect your stomach. Carbonation, ginger, and then a combination of those two things in ginger ale

And whether or not any of these help is actually still being debated in the medical world. So I'm gonna talk about that today. Let's get started

Experts don't totally agree on whether carbonation in soda helps with a stomach ache

Some claim that the air bubbles from soda in a stomach might make a person feel better, but according to the Mayo Clinic, carbonation can lead to our old friends bloat and gas

So it's possible to make your stomach issue worse by drinking soda. And a 2008 review of medical literature about whether soda alleviates a stomach ache found

no scientific evidence that it can. They also looked at the possibility that it would be rehydrating for a sick person to

drink coke, ginger ale, or clear soda. they determined that it wouldn't be. According to the researchers, quote

carbonated drinks, flat or otherwise, including cola, provide inadequate fluid and electrolyte

replacement and cannot be recommended. I don't know if the person who said that sounded like

that but you don know either so Ginger on the other hand has a reputation for being good for digestion but there are some conflicting studies on whether it actually is One 2011 study examined 744 cancer patients who were receiving chemotherapy which typically makes people nauseous Some

were given a placebo, and three others were given varying amounts of ginger. The study was randomized and double-blind, meaning neither the experimenters nor the patients knew which

groups people belonged to. According to the results, quote, all doses of ginger significantly

reduced acute nausea severity compared to placebo on day one of chemotherapy. The largest

reduction in nausea intensity occurred with 0.5 grams and 1 gram of ginger

Additionally, there have been studies that show that ginger can help with nausea during pregnancy, motion sickness, and post-surgery

That sounds promising, but the writers of the study I described earlier did note that their results conflicted with a very similar study in 2009

It was also randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. The researchers examined 162 cancer patients and found that ginger did not help alleviate

chemotherapy-induced nausea. So at last, we can finally definitively say it's hard to say

If it helped in the past, there's no reason you shouldn't have some ginger ale if you're feeling sick

Since ginger has been shown to help with stomach issues in some cases, try to find ginger ale

with ginger root in the ingredients