Why spoonful of cinnamon

Irritation of the lungs can cause inflammation, thickening of the tissue in the lungs and permanent lung scarring -- which can lead to even more serious consequences such as pneumonia or a collapsed lung. Cinnamon is a healthy addition to your diet when it's added to foods rather than swallowed dry. Obviously, you should skip the cinnamon challenge, but do keep the spice as part of your healthy eating plan.

Use cinnamon in homemade bread and muffin recipes or sprinkle it over a bowl of oatmeal or other cooked grains such as farina or quinoa. Simmer cinnamon with skim milk and ginger for a tasty drink or soak a cinnamon stick in a mug of hot tea to boost the flavor. Think outside the box and add ground cinnamon to beans or sprinkle a small amount over cooked protein such as chicken or fish. Sara Ipatenco has taught writing, health and nutrition. She started writing in and has been published in Teaching Tolerance magazine.

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Community Health Needs Assessment. Why Is the Cinnamon Challenge Dangerous? Health Library Search. Contact Us. Do you remember smelling formaldehyde in your high school biology class when dissecting some dead animal? That's what cinnamaldehyde can do in high concentrations. Okay, I'm being overly dramatic here. It's 3, next, that's the biggest health problem. Cinnamon is ground tree bark. So not only are you inhaling a tissue fixative, you're also inhaling powdered bark.

That's why it's difficult to spit out or, more importantly, get out of your lungs. The cellulose matrix of tree bark acts like a sustained release medicine, but in this case releasing a painful and damaging chemical. The body cannot metabolize cellulose. That's probably okay for the stuff that's swallowed. It'll only burn tomorrow morning at potty time. But the stuff in the lungs is hard to expire. In my grandfather's day, inhaling coal dust led to a condition called black lung.

In my father's day, people would get a lung cancer called mesothelioma from inhaling asbestos fibers. In , a paper in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine detailed the lung disease and hair and weight loss in Sri Lankan spice workers who process cinnamon quills.

Only doing it once can trigger an asthma attack. Doing it once won't cause any of these chronic illnesses -- probably. This paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Research shows that rats given a single intratracheal dose of cinnamon powder can develop severe lung damage a month later.