Cabbage is put to the test in a randomized controlled trial.
My video Benefits of Cabbage Leaves for Relief of Engorged Breasts opens with a photo published in the British Medical Journal of a woman with a cabbage leaf taped onto her knee to help with her osteoarthritis. In response to that picture, doctors wrote in to the editor, asserting that cabbage leaves can help inflammation of any soul part. “You may plane find that there is a enshroud of cabbage in the fridge of your local maternity unit.” Why? Not only is cabbage “cheaper than any of the heady gel filled pouches you can buy,” but knees are not the only “anatomical shapes” that “the leaves conform well to.”
Breast engorgement, when the breasts wilt overfilled with milk during breastfeeding and wilt hard, tight, and painful, can negatively impact both mother and infant alike. So, why not put cabbage leaves on them? A lactation consultant in a breastfeeding periodical suggests wearing “cabbage leaves either inside a bra or as a shrink covered by a tomfool towel” as it sensibly works like a charm. And, once the swelling goes down, frequent breastfeeding should help the breasts from refilling too much.
Where did she plane get this idea? Well, without her son got in a car accident, she wrapped his leg in cabbage…and the rest is history. The only wrongheaded side effect identified was a complaint from the son who felt “like a vegetable.”
Based on the information she collected, she terminated that “cool untried cabbage compresses have anti-inflammatory, anti-edema [anti-swelling] and anti-infectious properties,” but you don’t really know, until you put it to the test. Yes, but who’s going to do a randomized controlled study of cabbage leaves? Scientists, that’s who. Do cabbage leaves prevent breast engorgement? Let’s find out.
Researchers randomized 120 women to wield cabbage leaves to their breasts or not. Though the cabbage group tended to report less breast engorgement, the trend was not statistically significant. However, one of the big issues we superintendency well-nigh is premature weaning, and the cabbage group did seem to be worldly-wise to proffer the time they were exclusively breastfeeding. So, the researchers said they “cannot rule out the possibility that cabbage leaves had a uncontrived effect on breast engorgement, and that this may have unsalaried to the increased breastfeeding success in the experimental group. However, we consider that the positive effect was increasingly likely to have been mediated by psychological mechanisms.” In other words, they were talking well-nigh the placebo effect. They did weed out some of the true believers “in the value of cabbage leaf application,” though, as some women refused to join the study out of fear they might end up in the tenancy group and not be worldly-wise to use them.
At 2:42 in my video and below, you can see the results of a similar study performed recently that found that while subtracting cabbage leaves to early breast superintendency didn’t significantly reduce pain, it did seem to significantly reduce breast hardness. Since it probably can’t hurt, some women might just want to requite it a try, but it would be nice to get some increasingly touchable answers. For example, how well-nigh a treatment trial instead of just prevention? Researchers “suggest that women could be randomized to receive either hot or unprepossessed cabbage leaves,” and to tenancy for the placebo effect, you could use placebo cabbage, like iceberg lettuce leaves. In fact, since both breasts are affected, “women could moreover be used as their own controls, using variegated treatments for engorgement on each breast,” like a cabbage leaf on one breast and turning over a new leaf on the other.
How well-nigh a comparison of chilled cabbage leaves versus chilled gel packs? Just unprepossessed vacated “decreases thoroughbred flow…and might therefore, subtract engorgement of the breast.” On the other hand, “cabbage leaves may contain a chemical that the mother’s skin absorbs, thus reducing edema and increasing milk flow.” You don’t know, until you put it to the test.
“Thirty-four lactating women with breast engorgement used chilled cabbage leaves on one breast and chilled gel packs on the other for up to eight hours.” Their pain levels were established surpassing and without treatment. The result? There was no difference. Both treatments appeared to work well-nigh just as well, with two thirds reporting relief within hours, either way—though, interestingly, the majority of mothers preferred the cabbage leaves.
“The similarity in the effect of both treatments may have been caused by the fact that both unromantic cold, although the effects of the unprepossessed in the cabbage leaves would have been transitory.” So, perhaps there’s something special in cabbage leaves without all? What we need is a comparison of chilled versus room-temperature cabbage, and we got just that. In flipside study, one breast got the chilled cabbage leaf and the other got a room-temperature cabbage leaf, and there was no difference between the two. They both seemed to work, suggesting that it’s not the unprepossessed itself that’s doing it, but we still don’t know what role the placebo effect is playing.
If you were going to diamond a study to determine if there was some special recipe in cabbage that could subtract breast engorgement, what would you do? You could try the iceberg lettuce, but if women have heard well-nigh the cabbage effect, they might have an expectation bias in favor of the cabbage. Well, how well-nigh using a cabbage leaf extract? Then, you can finally do a double-blind experiment where women are asked to rub on a surf containing either a cabbage leaf pericope or a placebo cream, and they don’t know which treatment they’re getting. Researchers plane widow rosewater to both creams “to hush-up any residual odor of cabbage in the experimental cream.” The result? There was no difference in relief. Now, “the subtract in discomfort produced by the cream…was not as strong as that produced by the real cabbage leaves in the previous studies.” The superiority of the whole leaves “might be explained by a failure of the pericope to contain the potentially zippy chemical in the cabbage leaves,” or maybe the chemical tapped lanugo or wasn’t well-matured enough, or maybe there was just a powerful placebo effect of wearing cabbage leaves. The marrow line is that, “even though no zippy pharmacological substance in cabbage leaves has been identified in the literature, its user-friendly shape, low cost, wide availability and purported soothing effect make it a sought without treatment.”
And you thought all cabbage was good for was coleslaw!
Does it work for knee arthritis? Check out Benefits of Cabbage Leaves on the Knee for Osteoarthritis.
What else can cabbage do? See The Benefits of Kale and Cabbage for Cholesterol.
