Goji Products

Archive for the ‘Goji’ Category

No fruit has ever been the subject of as much scientific speculation as the Goji Berry has. From analyzing its' extremely high levels of antioxidants to simple nutritional profiling, goji has had more papers written about its unusually high health properties than any other fruit or berry.

This is because records of goji berries go back five thousand years in China! Naturally, Chinese doctors have been able to shed some light on this berry as long as there have been 'scientific papers.'

Official lab work has been done on Goji samples from various places, time and time again. The overall findings in each case were exciting, but none so as impressive as grade A Ningxia goji. In nearly every possible way, from it's nutritional content to it's ORAC (antioxidant capacity) score, Ningxia goji berries are at the top of the list when compared to just about anything else on earth.

Goji Antioxidant Research

Brunswick Labs, based in Wareham MA, have performed many ORAC and S-ORAC tests on both fresh and freeze-dried goji samples. Brunswick Labs is internationally recognized as the premier ORAC testing lab, and the US government uses them constantly in conjunction with the US department of agriculture.

Various Goji Berry product manufacturers have independently submitted their samples of Goji to Brunswick Labs and most returned promising results. However, none to date have surpassed a sample of freeze-dried Ningxia, grade-A goji, at 303 umTE per gram!

Keep in mind that while freeze-drying does allow one to concentrate the number of antioxidants in a gram of any sample, the process does remove some of the other nutrients, such as those that give goji it's high Protein content.

Unlike other berries though, a Ningxia Wolfberry does not lose the vast majority of it's freeze-dried ORAC score when tested as fresh berries.

When tested as a fresh berry, per gram, a grade A Ningxia Goji Berry still scores a very respectable 95 umTE.

To put that in perspective, the next fruit down on the list is a prune, at 57 umTE/g, and then a blackberry, at 51 umTE/g.

Admittedly, three other fruits, in their fresh form, score higher on the ORAC assay than goji does. Acai, (184 umTE/g) Black Raspberry, (164 umTE/g) and Pomegranate. (105 umTE/g)

However, none of those offer the vast wealth of other nutritional benefits like Goji does.

You likely wouldn't be reading this website if you didn't already know that Goji berries are extremely powerful sources of vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and antioxidants. But did you also know that in the very few short years since they were first imported to the US, the US Food and Drug Administration recognizes them among the planet's very most valuable single sources of Antioxidants? It's hard to believe, but it's true. Even as recently as 1996, Goji berries had not even been sold outside of Asia at all.

Meanwhile, in the Ningxia province of northern China, where all of the most potent Goji is grown, the number of people over 100 years of age outnumbers the rest of China by 20 TIMES! In fact, some of the elders there are still working their daily jobs at 100 years of age, and a few of them have lived beyond 120!

So how can such an incredible food source be kept secret so long?

Shhhh, It's an ancient Chinese secret! Quite literally, it's been in Chinese medical journals and remedies since long before Christ was born, but a sense of national pride has kept the Chinese from letting foreigners know about their "Secret weapon" until recently.

Very recently, in fact. A US doctor by the name of Gary Young was the first person on record to import a large quantity of Ningxia Goji (The most potent variety) into the US, and that was only in 1996.

Soon afterwards an Olympic Swimmer for China, named Wu Yanyan, started breaking world records at the Chinese national games, crediting mainly a new diet of wolfberries & boiled walnuts for her performance boost. She was in fact forced to 'spill the beans' because of all the scrutiny on Asian teams using illegal performance-enhancing drugs at the time. (Which she tested, without a doubt, negative for.)

Not long after the word hit the rest of the world that Wolfberries were 'the new fountain of youth,' companies came out of the woodwork to start selling these tart little dried-up berries (which look just like red raisins) to consumers worldwide.

However, the potency of the nutrients and antioxidants in these berries vary greatly and very few (if any) are directly from the Ningxia province.

Soon many companies throughout the world were exporting Goji, but since there are 7 different species of the Goji plant and even three different grades of the Ningxia Goji Berry, not many high-quality Goji berries ever made it out of China.

Worse yet, a few unscrupulous companies that have recently been marketing Goji products in the United States (at least) are even misrepresenting where they came from!

If you have ever heard of Goji berries from Tibet or the Himalayas, you have been lied to. Goji Plants can only grow in warm, low-lying regions like the Ningxia province, Meanwhile Tibet and the entire Himalayan region are both at very high altitudes, with temperatures that are completely unsuitable for growing all species of Goji. It would be like trying to grow a coconut tree in Aspen, Colorado.

Today, your best bet of getting your hands on high-quality, high-grade Goji berries is to travel to China. Many cities throughout Asia, even in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, stock Ningxia Goji berries in one or more forms because of their large Chinese populations.

Sadly, there is no official certification in other countries as of yet for declaring the quality and origins of Goji. Only the Ningxia "Green Certification" says if it was even grown in the province or not, and naturally, not all Goji will come with that certification, especially when they were not grown there.