Moringa (Sohanjna) and Blood Sugar: The Sabzi, the Powder, and What the Trials Found

Sohanjna — moringa, the drumstick tree — grows along canals, in courtyards and beside roads across Punjab and Sindh. In spring its long green pods, sohanjne ki phalliyan, turn up in salan and bhujia, and in some homes the flowers are cooked too. Over the last decade the dried leaf has found a second life as a green powder sold in pharmacies, online stores and hikmat shops, often with a label promising it will "control sugar."

Those are two quite different things, and they need separate answers. Eating sohanjna as a vegetable is a food question. Taking spoonfuls of leaf powder or capsules every day to bring your sugar down is a supplement question — and that is where the evidence is much thinner than the marketing suggests.

Sohanjna as sabzi: a genuinely useful vegetable

As food, sohanjna is easy to recommend. Both the pods and the leaves are low in carbohydrate for their volume, and the leaves are unusually high in protein, calcium and iron for a green vegetable. The figures below are from USDA FoodData Central (opens in a new tab), per 100 grams raw:

So a bowl of sohanjne ki phalli fits comfortably into the vegetable half of your plate. What decides its effect on your reading is mostly what goes in alongside it: how much oil or ghee is in the tarka, whether the salan has been bulked out with aloo, and how many rotis or how much rice you eat with it. A sohanjna salan with two chapatis is a very different meal from the same salan with potatoes, extra ghee and a plate of rice.

One thing worth knowing: the pods are fairly rich in potassium. For most people that is a plus. If your doctor has told you to limit potassium because of kidney disease, ask how much sohanjna fits into your diet, the same way you would for other potassium-rich vegetables.

Moringa powder and capsules: what the trials found

Laboratory and animal studies on moringa leaf extracts are where most of the "lowers blood sugar" claims come from. Human trials are a different story, and there are not many of them.

The most complete picture comes from a 2025 meta-analysis in the journal Nutrients (opens in a new tab) that pooled every randomized controlled trial it could find on moringa supplements and heart-and-metabolic health — nine trials, about 650 people in total, two of them run in Pakistan. Across the seven trials that measured fasting blood sugar, moringa made no statistically significant difference compared with placebo. Across the three that measured HbA1c, the same. The authors rated the certainty of the evidence as very low for every outcome and concluded that current evidence does not support consistent benefits.

A few individual trials did report improvements. Two Spanish trials in people with prediabetes saw fasting glucose and HbA1c fall after 12 weeks of 2.4 grams of leaf powder a day. A trial in women with type 2 diabetes saw HbA1c drop by 0.59% on 10 grams a day for three months — but participants knew what they were taking, which makes the result harder to trust. Other trials found nothing.

A placebo-controlled trial from Thailand (opens in a new tab) is a good example of the null side. Thirty-two people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, not yet on any medicine, took moringa leaf capsules or a dummy capsule for four weeks. At the end there was no meaningful difference between the groups in fasting glucose or HbA1c. Four weeks is short, and the authors say so — but it is also roughly how long many people try a remedy before deciding it "works."

Put plainly: moringa has less clinical support for blood sugar than kalonji, and nothing that would put it anywhere near a replacement for metformin or any other prescribed treatment.

If you take medication

Eating the leaves, pods or seeds as food is generally considered safe, according to Memorial Sloan Kettering's About Herbs database (opens in a new tab). Supplements are a more concentrated dose, and that is where the open questions sit:

• Sitagliptin. In an animal study, long-term moringa reduced the blood-sugar-lowering effect of sitagliptin, a DPP-4 tablet often prescribed on its own or combined with metformin. Nobody has tested whether this happens in people, but if you take a gliptin it is a reason to watch your readings rather than assume.
• Other medicines. In laboratory work moringa slowed CYP3A4, a liver enzyme that clears many common drugs. The effect in humans is unknown.
• Lows. If moringa does lower sugar for you, combining it with a sulfonylurea (such as gliclazide or glimepiride) or insulin is where a low becomes possible. The Thai trial saw no lows, but its participants were on no diabetes medicine at all.
• What's actually in the packet. The World Health Organization (opens in a new tab) warns that unregulated herbal products can be contaminated or secretly mixed with pharmaceutical drugs. A loose green powder with no batch number or manufacturer gives you no way to know.

If you want to try it anyway

Plenty of people will — moringa is cheap, it grows next door, and an elder in the family swears by it. If that is you, a few steps keep it safe and give you an honest answer about whether it helps:

1. 1Tell your doctor what you are taking and how much, including the brand.
2. 2Keep every prescribed medicine exactly as it is. Moringa goes on top of treatment, never instead of it.
3. 3Log your fasting and after-meal readings for a week or two before you start, then keep logging once you begin. Change only one thing at a time, so you know what caused any difference.
4. 4If you see readings below 70 mg/dL, or feel shaky and sweaty, stop the supplement and speak to your doctor about it.
5. 5Judge it by your HbA1c after about three months, not by a single good morning reading.

Let your readings decide

Whether it's sohanjna salan for dinner or a spoon of powder in the morning, log your meals and readings in Diatic. A few weeks of before-and-after numbers tells you — and your doctor — more than any label.

Start logging with Diatic (opens Diatic on Google Play in a new tab)