Does Ginger Ale Help an Upset Stomach?

Somebody in your house keeps ginger ale in the fridge for exactly one purpose. You get sick, a cold can appears next to your bed, and nobody has ever explained why it's that drink and not another one. It gets handed over with the confidence of a prescription.

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Two things both have to be true for the can to work the way everyone assumes it does. There has to be enough ginger in it to do something, and ginger has to do something in the first place. Both of those are shakier than the habit suggests, and the second one is shakier than the first.

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Read the ingredient list

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A US can of Canada Dry lists carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, ginger extract, natural flavors, citric acid, sodium benzoate, and caramel color. Ginger is on there, which surprises people who have heard that there is none at all. Ingredient lists run in order by weight, though, and ginger extract sits behind the corn syrup, in the stretch of the label that CBC's Marketplace team reported the US can marks as "less than two per cent" of the drink. That two percent also has to cover the flavors, the acid, the preservative, and the coloring, so ginger's share of it is some fraction of an already small number.

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Other brands don't clear even that bar. Vernors, the Detroit ginger ale that people in Michigan swear by, lists "natural and artificial flavors" and names no ginger anywhere. The Canadian version of Canada Dry lists carbonated water, sugar, citric acid, sodium benzoate, natural flavour, and caramel colour, with no ginger named at all, while the front of that same Canadian can still says it's made from real ginger.

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Reed's, which built a brand on the opposite promise, lists sparkling filtered water, cane sugar, pressed organic ginger, natural flavors, and citric acid, which puts actual ginger third on the list. Reed's still won't say how much, and neither will anyone else. Not one mainstream ginger ale prints a quantity of ginger on the label, in milligrams or grams or anything else.

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A federal judge went looking for the ginger

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In 2016 a California buyer sued over the words "Made From Real Ginger" on the front of a Canada Dry can, and the case ran in federal court into 2019. Discovery complicated the lawsuit, because there is real ginger in there. The judge wrote that "Canada Dry does contain traces of real ginger, in the form of ginger oleoresin," which is a concentrated extract pulled out of the root with a solvent.

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So the plaintiffs changed their argument from "there's no ginger" to "there's no useful amount of ginger," and hired a chemist to measure it. Dr Pepper never challenged what he found, which the court summarized this way: the concentration in parts per million of 6-gingerol and 6-shogaol, the two compounds that carry most of ginger's activity, "in Canada Dry is far below what a person would be able to detect when drinking the ginger ale." Nobody has said since what that concentration actually is.

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The same filing contains a survey of what buyers thought they were getting. Of Californians who bought Canada Dry, 78.5 percent read "Made From Real Ginger" as meaning the drink was made using ginger root, and 4.8 percent read it as meaning ginger oleoresin, which is what's in it. Asked to choose, 92.4 percent preferred the version made with ginger root.

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The case settled in 2019 with a permanent injunction barring the phrase "Made from Real Ginger" from Canada Dry labeling, and an explicit carve-out letting the company keep the words "real ginger" as long as they're paired with "taste," "extract," or "flavor." The company admitted nothing, and the agreement says so in as many words: "all such allegations are expressly denied." Canada Dry told CBC that it changed the US packaging to "avoid costly and protracted litigation," and that it left the Canadian label alone because the claim "still accurately describes the product as it is formulated."

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The doses the studies actually used

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Every trial that found anything gave people ginger in capsules, at somewhere between half a gram and two grams a day, usually for several days running. The most common setup in the whole literature is 250 mg four times a day.

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The biggest one ever run enrolled 744 chemotherapy patients and analyzed 576 of them, comparing placebo against 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 grams of ginger a day. Each capsule held "a purified liquid extract of ginger root" standardized to 8.5 mg of combined gingerols, zingerone, and shogaols, suspended in olive oil with solubility excipients. That's a manufactured pharmaceutical preparation, engineered so the active compounds survive to be swallowed.

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Only one published laboratory study has ever measured those compounds in a ginger ale, and it tested Australian supermarket drinks rather than any American brand. The house-brand ginger ale came out at 4.56 mg of total gingerols and shogaols per 250 mL serving by the paper's own per-serving table. The authors used the chemotherapy trial as their benchmark, noting that its effective daily dose worked out to 17 mg of gingerol and shogaol at the 0.5 gram level. Four of their products got close to that number. The ginger ale was not one of them, and the products that did reach it were ginger beers, which are a different and much stronger drink.

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No one has published a measurement of Canada Dry, Schweppes, Seagram's, or Vernors, so nobody outside of a courtroom has ever put a number on the ginger in an American can.

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Whether ginger works at all

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Ginger capsules and ginger chews are sold on the same promise, and they carry a dose the soda doesn't, so the cleaner question is whether ginger does anything once you're actually taking enough of it.

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Pregnancy nausea has the strongest evidence behind it, and it is still thin. The most-cited review pooled 12 trials and 1,278 women and found that ginger "significantly improved the symptoms of nausea when compared to placebo," by 1.20 points on a 0 to 10 scale. The same review found no significant reduction in vomiting, described its own evidence as "low quality," and got that headline number by pooling two trials and 129 women. Cochrane, which reviews this literature for a living, looked at 41 trials and 5,449 women and concluded that there is "a lack of high-quality evidence to support any particular intervention," ginger included.

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Motion sickness is where ginger's reputation is strongest and its evidence is weakest. The trial people cite put 36 undergraduates in a tilted spinning chair in 1982 and reported that ginger beat Dramamine. A better-designed study nine years later put 28 volunteers through the same kind of provocation and found that powdered ginger at 500 mg and 1,000 mg, and fresh root at 1,000 mg, "provided no protection against motion sickness," while scopolamine (a prescription motion-sickness drug) worked on the same people in the same chair. The seasickness trial at 1 gram in 80 naval cadets did cut vomiting, and reported that on nausea itself "the difference was not statistically significant." The NIH's complementary health center reads the whole pile the same way: "Most studies of ginger for motion sickness haven't shown it to be helpful."

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Cancer care has spent the most money looking. ASCO's guideline says that "evidence remains insufficient for a recommendation for or against the use of ginger." The European and international guideline update in 2023 went further and explained the split, saying that a search turned up 15 studies but reached no conclusion "because seven negative studies were of higher quality and outweighed the eight positive studies which mainly used inadequate antiemetics," and that "due to conflicting evidence, no recommendation can be made for ginger." A 162-patient trial that added ginger on top of modern anti-nausea drugs found no benefit, and reported a problem that runs through this entire field: "Participants were able to accurately guess which treatment they had received."

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Ginger tastes like ginger. Almost none of these studies are truly blinded, which means that expectation is doing unmeasured work in every positive result, including the good ones.

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Ginger does measurably speed up your stomach, which is the finding that usually gets quoted half-way. In 24 healthy volunteers, 1.2 grams cut the time for the stomach to half-empty from 26.7 minutes to 13.1. In the same experiment there was "no significant difference in any gastrointestinal symptoms," and when the same group repeated it in 11 people with ordinary indigestion, the stomach moved faster and the symptoms didn't budge.

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The European medicines regulator lists ginger's own common side effects, at a rate between 1 in 100 and 1 in 10, as "stomach upset, eructation, dyspepsia, heartburn and nausea." Eructation is burping. The regulator's approved adult dose is 1 to 2 grams an hour before travel, and it says that use "in children and adolescents under 18 years of age is not recommended" because nobody has studied it properly in that age group.

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The sugar and the bubbles

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A 12 oz can of Canada Dry carries 33 grams of sugar. The brands that do put real ginger in the bottle land in the same range, so trading up on the ginger does nothing about the sugar.

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As a drink for someone who is actively throwing up, that composition is poor. A table of common "clear liquids" in American Family Physician, adapted from a 1992 CDC report, puts ginger ale at 3 mEq/L of sodium and an osmolality (a measure of how concentrated a fluid is) of 540 mOsm/kg. The oral rehydration solution that the WHO and UNICEF recommend worldwide runs 75 mmol/L of sodium at 245 mOsm/L. Ginger ale has almost none of the salt you're losing and roughly twice the concentration you want, which is the reasoning behind advice you'll see from several health systems. The NHS tells you to "drink lots of fluids, such as water or squash" and, in the same breath, not to "have fruit juice or fizzy drinks" because "they can make diarrhoea worse." NIDDK lists sweetened beverages among the things that may worsen symptoms. NICE tells British clinicians to discourage carbonated drinks in young children with gastroenteritis, and repeats the instruction five separate times in one guideline. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that soda, juices, and sports drinks "have the wrong amounts of sugar and salt and may make your child sicker."

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That advice is less settled than it sounds. The adult guidance and the pediatric guidance disagree about sugary drinks, and the trial most often cited against them found children did better on dilute apple juice than on a proper electrolyte solution. What to Eat When You Have a Stomach Bug works through that argument. The sugar matters most when you're losing serious amounts of fluid, and much less when you have a mild bug and the alternative is drinking nothing at all.

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Carbonated drinks do measurably relax the muscle at the bottom of your esophagus, which KYG covered in Are Energy Drinks Bad for Your Stomach?. Ginger appears to do the same thing on its own, in one 14-person manometry study. Neither finding has been shown to cause symptoms in anybody.

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Where the habit came from

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Ginger ale started in pharmacies. John McLaughlin, who created Canada Dry, trained at the Ontario College of Pharmacy and was selling carbonated mineral waters before he ever made a soda, in an era when, as the Canadian Encyclopedia puts it, "carbonated beverages were believed to have health benefits." His company's ads suggested its waters "could treat ailments such as gout and rheumatic pains." He introduced the lighter, less sugary Canada Dry formula in 1904, and by 1907 the Toronto Daily Star was reporting that "its stimulating effect on the digestive organs makes it a prime favourite." James Vernor was a Detroit pharmacist who, by the Detroit Historical Society's account, was "experimenting with a medicinal tonic of vanilla and spices, adding ginger to calm the stomach."

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The drink got lighter and cheaper over the next century, and the ginger shrank to a flavoring, while the reputation it picked up in the pharmacy years stayed put.

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Professional bodies haven't fully let go of it either, and they contradict each other. ACOG tells pregnant patients that ginger can help settle the stomach and lists what to try, including "ginger ale made with real ginger," which is a qualifier that most of the supermarket shelf fails. NCCN's 2026 patient guide skips the qualifier entirely and says "ginger ale or flat cola might also help settle your stomach." Neither is citing a trial of ginger ale, because there isn't one.

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What to drink instead

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For an ordinary stomach bug, the NHS advice is small sips, often, of water. If you're losing a lot of fluid, an oral rehydration solution (the powder you mix into water, sold as Pedialyte and as cheaper store-brand versions that work identically) is built for exactly this, and its salt and sugar concentrations are set for fluid you're losing rather than for taste. What to eat alongside it, including why the bananas-rice-applesauce-toast routine got retired, is What to Eat When You Have a Stomach Bug.

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If you want the ginger itself, the forms that carry a real dose are capsules, tea made from fresh grated ginger, and ginger chews, which is most of what ACOG lists too. Anyone under 18 is in a group that the European regulator says hasn't been studied properly, and ginger's own side effect list includes heartburn, so start small and stop if it makes things worse. If you're on a blood thinner, mention it to whoever prescribed it before you start taking grams of anything.

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And if what you want is a cold sweet drink that you can keep down, ginger ale is fine at that job. In the one published dataset that names it, a survey of 45 people with a stomach-emptying disorder, ginger ale landed in the group of foods that were "tolerated by patients (not provoking symptoms)." The foods that actually improved symptoms were saltine crackers, jello, and graham crackers. Tolerated is a lower bar than helpful, and on most sick nights it is the one you need cleared.

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When to stop guessing

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Most stomach bugs are over quickly. The NHS says vomiting usually stops in one or two days and diarrhoea within five to seven, and tells you to get advice if you go past those marks.

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Get seen sooner for blood in your vomit or stool, vomit that looks like coffee grounds, black tarry stool, severe stomach pain, or if you can't keep any fluid down at all. Dehydration worth acting on looks like dark yellow pee or peeing much less than normal, dizziness when you stand up that doesn't pass, and unusual tiredness.

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Tell a parent or a doctor rather than waiting it out to see whether the ginger ale is working.

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Sources

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