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Gingers

Zingiberaceae (family), “Ginger Family”, “Cardamom”

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Zingiberaceae () or the ginger family is a family of flowering plants made up of about 50 genera with a total of about 1600 known species of aromatic perennial herbs with creeping horizontal or tuberous rhizomes distributed throughout tropical Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Members of the family Zingiberaceae including turmeric, ginger, Javanese ginger, and galangal have been used for centuries in traditional medicine. Preclinical studies of Zingiberaceae extracts have shown analgesic properties.The genus Curcuma Longa is one of the largest genera in the Zingiberaceae, with about 80 species, and distributed throughout tropical Asia from India to South China, Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia. This species is well known as the “commercial turmeric”. It is widely…