If you have asthma and are having trouble controlling it with conventional medication, consider supplementing with ginger. A daily dose of 2 grams of ginger won't completely solve your problem, but it will noticeably improve your quality of life.

Study
Charles Emala, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University, published a study in Pharmaceuticals in which he divided 32 subjects into two groups.

For eight weeks, half of the subjects took a placebo daily, while the other half took a capsule containing ginger extract twice a day during that period.

All subjects had mild to moderate asthma. They were taking medication, but their condition was not under control. They regularly experienced shortness of breath at night or had to frequently use a rescue inhaler.

The composition of the supplement is shown in the figure below. Click on it for a larger version. We found the values in another publication by the group of researchers to which Emala belongs. [J Agric Food Chem. 2022 Aug 10;70(31):9674-83.]

The researchers suspect that 6-shogaol is the most important bioactive substance in ginger for people with asthma. If this is correct, and you use ginger powder dried at 80 degrees Celsius, you would need about 7 grams of it.

If the drying process was done at lower temperatures, this dose increases to 13 grams. [Prev Nutr Food Sci. 2012 Jun;17(2):166-71.]

Results
Supplementation had no effect on lung function or on inflammatory activity in the blood. Supplementation did improve the quality of life of the subjects. They gained better control of their disease. The positive effect was modest, but significant enough to be noticeable to the subjects.

The improvement in quality of life occurred in the first 4 weeks of supplementation. Thereafter, it stabilized.

Mechanism
The researchers suspect that bioactive compounds in ginger, such as 6-gingerol, 8-gingerol, and especially 6-shogaol, have a mild anti-inflammatory effect. At the same time, they relax the involuntary muscles in the airways. [Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol. 2021 Nov 1;321(5):L912-24.]

Conclusion
"This is the first human-controlled study to demonstrate that the oral ingestion of a dietary supplement of ginger can improve asthma symptom control", writes Emala.

"It remains to be determined if higher daily doses of oral ginger extract can further improve asthma symptom control by objective and subjective measures and whether specific endotypes of asthmatics selectively demonstrate benefit."