CBG Research: What Human Trials Actually Show
By Marc Narrie, founder of Buddha Beans Coffee Co. Published September 3, 2026.
Wellness notice. This article describes published research on the compound cannabigerol. It is not medical advice, and it is not a claim about what Buddha Beans coffee or any Buddha Beans product does. The FDA has not evaluated statements about hemp compounds on this page. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or managing a health condition, talk to your healthcare provider before adding any hemp product to your routine.
The short answer
CBG (cannabigerol) is a non-intoxicating compound found in hemp. As of September 2026, three placebo-controlled trials of isolated CBG have been published in humans. One found a short-term effect on self-reported anxiety in 34 healthy adults. One found no significant difference from placebo on its main sleep measure over four weeks. One tested only safety and reported no robust effects at all. Almost everything else written about CBG comes from cells in dishes and rodents, not people.
Larger trials exist on the public registry, including a completed 332-person study and a completed 100-person study. Neither has released results. That is the honest state of the evidence. The rest of this page shows the studies themselves, what each one measured, and where each one stops.
What is CBG?
CBG is short for cannabigerol. In a living hemp plant it begins as CBGA (cannabigerolic acid), the acidic compound the plant's enzymes convert into the precursors of CBD, THC and CBC. Because the plant consumes most of it during growth, mature hemp typically retains only a small percentage as CBG, which is why it is described as a minor cannabinoid and why it has historically been more expensive to extract than CBD.
CBG is non-intoxicating. It does not produce a high. It is a different molecule from CBD, not a synonym or a grade of it.
If you want to try CBG on its own, our water-soluble CBG tincture comes in 300mg and 900mg bottles, with third-party lab results for every batch.
How many human trials of CBG exist?
Three published placebo-controlled trials have tested isolated CBG in people. Here they are in full.
| Study | Design | People | What it measured | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cuttler et al., 2024 Scientific Reports |
Double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover; single 20 mg dose | 34 healthy adults | Self-reported anxiety, stress, mood, memory | Reduced self-reported anxiety versus placebo; no effect on mood |
| Emerson et al., 2026 Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids |
Decentralized, randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled; 25 mg then 50 mg daily, 4 weeks | 63 Veterans randomized | Sleep quality (MOS-SS SPI-II), quality of life | No statistically significant difference from placebo |
| Wolinsky et al., 2026 J. Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics |
Single ascending dose, 0 to 200 mg oral | 12 healthy adults | Safety, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics | Well tolerated; authors report no robust pharmacodynamic effects |
Those three are the only published trials that gave people CBG on its own, against a placebo, and measured what happened.
So how many people have actually been studied?
Several thousand. The number is not small. What matters is what kind of study each person took part in, because the categories are not interchangeable.
| Type of research | Studies | People | What it can establish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Placebo-controlled trials of CBG alone | 3 | ~109 | Whether CBG itself outperformed a placebo |
| Human pharmacokinetics | 1 | ~19 | How CBG is absorbed, not whether it helps |
| Trials of blends containing CBG | 2 | ~204 | How the blend performed; CBG cannot be separated out |
| Topical and skin studies | 2 | ~29 | Effects on skin, which say nothing about drinking it |
| Surveys and prevalence research | 4+ | 3,371+ | Who uses CBG and what they report, not whether it works |
The headcount is dominated by surveys. In one nationally representative sample of 1,523 US adults, 1.3 percent had ever tried CBG, against 35.2 percent for CBD. Surveys of that kind tell you a market exists and what people believe they experienced. They cannot tell you whether the compound outperformed a sugar pill, because nobody in them received a sugar pill.
The blend studies have a different problem. One tested CBG alongside CBD, beta-caryophyllene, branched-chain amino acids and magnesium. Another used a four-cannabinoid capsule containing 5 mg of CBG and had no placebo group at all. Whatever those participants experienced, no part of it can be assigned to CBG specifically.
Strip out the studies that cannot isolate the compound, and the published placebo-controlled record for CBG by itself is three trials.
Bigger trials exist. Their results do not.
As of October 2026, ClinicalTrials.gov lists sixteen studies with cannabigerol as the intervention, and several are far larger than anything published. The largest have finished. Their findings have not appeared.
| Trial | People | Status | Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cannabinoid blends for sleep quality (NCT07769164) | 332 | Completed Aug 2024 | None published or posted |
| Psychological and physiological effects of CBG, Washington State University (NCT06638996) | 100 | Completed Feb 2026 | None published or posted |
| Full-spectrum CBG, 50 mg daily for 8 weeks (NCT05743985) | 69 | Completed Apr 2024 | None published or posted |
| CBD + CBG + THC for chronic migraine (NCT04989413) | 110 | Terminated | None published or posted |
The 332-person sleep study is the largest CBG trial ever run. It was double-blind and placebo-controlled, and it finished in August 2024. It tested combinations of CBN, CBG and THC rather than CBG on its own, so it could not have isolated CBG regardless, but two years on there is no paper and no posted result.
The Washington State University trial is the one to watch. It gave 100 participants CBG or placebo, roughly three times the size of the 2024 anxiety study, and it completed on 27 February 2026. It is recent enough that a publication may still be coming.
One more number is worth stating plainly: of the sixteen registered studies, none has posted results to ClinicalTrials.gov. That includes the two that were eventually published in journals. Completed trials that never report are a recognised problem across all of medicine, not something particular to CBG, but it does mean the published record you can read is a selected portion of the research that was actually done, and there is no way to know which direction the missing results point.
What did the positive trial actually find?
Cuttler and colleagues gave 34 healthy adults a single 20 mg hemp-derived CBG tincture or a placebo, one week apart, in a double-blind crossover conducted remotely. Participants reported lower anxiety after CBG than after placebo, and performed better on a verbal memory task. No intoxication was observed and no adverse effects were detected.
The limits matter as much as the finding. It was one dose, measured within an hour. The participants were healthy adults with no anxiety disorder, all experienced cannabis users. The analysis did not correct for multiple comparisons, which raises the chance a result appears by luck. Mood showed no significant effect. The work was funded in part by a company whose chief executive is a co-author. It has not been replicated.
What did the trial nobody quotes find?
This is the study that rarely appears in CBG marketing, and it is the most rigorous one available.
Emerson and colleagues randomized 63 Veterans with sleep problems to oral CBG or placebo for four weeks, at 25 mg daily and then 50 mg daily. Sleep improved in both arms. The published abstract states there was no statistically significant difference between the CBG and placebo groups on the primary sleep measure. Quality-of-life and PTSD checklist scores followed the same pattern. The authors' own conclusion is that no firm conclusion on efficacy can be drawn, though the safety profile supports further study.
It is the only multi-week placebo-controlled efficacy trial of CBG in existence, and it did not beat placebo. Attrition was high, so it cannot rule out a small effect either. But any page that cites the anxiety trial and omits this one is showing you half the record.
What does the safety research show?
Wolinsky and colleagues gave 12 healthy adults ascending single oral doses of CBG isolate up to 200 mg. No drug-related adverse events occurred and liver function tests stayed within normal limits. It is the best-quality tolerability evidence available for oral CBG.
The same paper reports that CBG produced no robust pharmacodynamic effects. Both halves of that sentence are worth carrying: the tolerability data are reassuring, and they arrive attached to a finding that undercuts the marketing.
Why do so many CBG claims come from mice?
Most published CBG research is preclinical, meaning cell cultures and rodents. A 2021 review in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics by Nachnani, Raup-Konsavage and Vrana catalogues this pharmacology, including activity at CB1, CB2, TRP channels, alpha-2 adrenoceptors and 5-HT1A. It is a review, not an experiment, and its own significance statement notes CBG is marketed well ahead of its evidence. That review was supported by a sponsored research agreement from Pennsylvania Options for Wellness; we mention funding sources throughout this page because nearly every CBG study has one.
Preclinical work is how research begins, not how it ends. A compound that changes a signal in a transfected cell line, or an outcome in a chemically treated mouse, has cleared the first gate of many. The US Federal Trade Commission's Health Products Compliance Guidance is explicit that animal and in vitro studies may provide useful background, but without confirmation by human randomized controlled trials they are not sufficient to substantiate health claims.
A citation trap worth knowing about
If you go looking for CBG trials yourself, there is a specific error waiting for you.
A 2019 paper by Brierley and colleagues on chemotherapy-induced cachexia is indexed in PubMed with the publication type Randomized Controlled Trial. It is a study in 66 rats. The tag is a database classification artifact, not a description of the work. Anyone filtering PubMed for CBG randomized controlled trials will find a rodent study sitting in their human-trial results, and any summary built from that filter will overstate the evidence without the writer ever intending to.
We mention it because we nearly repeated it. Checking the model in the methods section, rather than trusting the tag, is the only reliable fix.
What we do not claim
We sell coffee and hemp products, so our incentive to overstate this is obvious. Here is where we draw the line.
- We do not claim CBG treats, prevents or improves any condition.
- We do not cite mouse or cell studies as evidence of benefit, because they are not.
- We do not publish dosing guidance for CBG. There is no human dose-response data to base it on.
- We do not claim our coffee produces any particular feeling or effect.
- We do state, plainly, that human CBG research is thin and partly negative.
What we do stand behind is what we can measure and show you: the milligrams in each batch, the origin and roast of the coffee, and a third-party certificate of analysis for the lot you are buying. That goes for our CBG coffee and our water-soluble CBG tincture alike.
Frequently asked questions
Is CBG the same as CBD?
No. CBG (cannabigerol) and CBD (cannabidiol) are distinct molecules. Both are non-intoxicating hemp compounds, and hemp plants produce far less CBG than CBD.
Does CBG get you high?
No. CBG is non-intoxicating. In the published human trials, no intoxication was observed.
Is CBG proven to work?
No. Three placebo-controlled human trials of isolated CBG have been published. One reported a short-term effect on self-reported anxiety in healthy adults, one found no significant difference from placebo on sleep over four weeks, and one tested safety only. That is not a proven compound; it is an early one.
Is CBG safe?
The available human tolerability data are limited but encouraging. In a single-ascending-dose study, oral CBG up to 200 mg was well tolerated in 12 healthy adults with no drug-related adverse events. Three small trials is not a substitute for long-term safety data, and none ran beyond four weeks.
Will CBG show up on a drug test?
Standard workplace drug tests screen for THC metabolites, not CBG. Broad-spectrum hemp products are formulated for non-detectable THC, but no hemp product can guarantee a test result. If you are tested, check with your provider first.
How much CBG research exists compared to CBD?
Far less. CBD has been studied in hundreds of human trials and has an FDA-approved prescription drug derived from it. Several thousand people have taken part in human research involving CBG, but most of that headcount comes from surveys. Three placebo-controlled trials of CBG on its own have been published. Larger trials have been completed and never reported.
Sources
- Cuttler C, Stueber A, Cooper ZD, Russo E. Acute effects of cannabigerol on anxiety, stress, and mood: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover, field trial. Scientific Reports. 2024;14:16163. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-66879-0 (PMID 39003387)
- Emerson CR, Webster CE, Daza EJ, Klamer BG, Tummalacherla M. Effect of Cannabigerol on Sleep and Quality of Life in Veterans: A Decentralized, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial. Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids. 2026;9(1):1-14 (published online December 9, 2025). doi:10.1159/000549902 (PMID 41574318; ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05088018)
- Wolinsky D, Srungaram D, Zhang A, et al. Safety, pharmacodynamics, and pharmacokinetics of oral cannabigerol in healthy adults. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. 2026;393:104984. doi:10.1016/j.jpet.2026.104984 (PMID 42575778)
- Nachnani R, Raup-Konsavage WM, Vrana KE. The Pharmacological Case for Cannabigerol. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. 2021;376(2):204-212. doi:10.1124/jpet.120.000340 (PMID 33168643)
- US Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Consumer Protection. Health Products Compliance Guidance. December 2022.
Last reviewed September 3, 2026. We update this page when new human CBG trials are published. If you find an error in it, email sales@buddhabeanscoffee.com and we will correct it.
