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cassia

Cassia is closely related to cinnamon and is often confused with it. Cassia has a strong, sweet taste and aroma more like cinnamon than cinnamon to American palates. Cassia hails from Burma instead of cinnamon's birthplace of Sri Lanka. A long used spice, cassia was used in China as long ago as 2500 B.C.

Cassia buds are highly aromatic and similar in appearance to cloves. In China the buds are used to give candy a cinnamon flavor. What you generally find sold as "Cinnamon sticks" are actually cassia bark quills. Cassia is commonly mixed with cinnamon in commercial "ground cinnamon." This mixture's potency is short lived, so be sure to keep it in airtight tinted glass containers, in a cool place.

Warning: Do not confuse Cinnamonum Cassia with Cassia Marilandica (wild senna) or Cassia senna (senna), these contain strong cathartics that may cause violent purging. Teas made from the Cassia family may be dangerous.

The leaf oil can used in tonics, antiseptics, and in remedies for intestinal gas, nausea, colds, and hypertension.

As a side note: it's not cost-effective for the major pharmaceutical companies to fund research to determine the effectiveness of naturally occurring substances. Since medical research is extremely expensive, and since naturally occurring pharmacological substances are very difficult to patent and trivial to reproduce, private sources do not tend to fund much research into medicinal uses of normal herbs. It's wise to be skeptical about any claims for herbal remedies, of course, but one can't assume that those claims are entirely invalid either, in the absence of any empirical evidence to refute them.