Product Name: Schisandra

Scientific Name: Schisandra chinensis

Uptake Blend: Black Pepper extract (10% piperine), Ginger extract (5% Ginerol), Cumin extract (10:1)

9 parts Schisandra 1 part Uptake Blend

Other Known Names: Five-flavour-fruit, schizandra, magnolia-vine, Chinese magnolia-vine, magnolia berry, wu wei zi, Gomishi, Omicha, Omija, Ngu mie gee.

What is it ? Schisandra chinensis - the five-flavour berry

A woody, deciduous climbing vine native to the forests of north-east China, the Russian Far East, Korea and Japan. It flowers in late spring and in autumn drops clusters of small bright-red berries. That's what we use, the fruit, nothing else from the plant.

Why "five flavours". The Chinese name wu wei zi (五味子) means five-flavour seed. Bite one and you get it: the skin and pulp are sweet and sour, the seeds are pungent and bitter, and the whole thing finishes salty. Traditional Chinese practice classified everything by flavour, and this was the rare berry that hit all five, which is why it was prized.

How long people have used it. Roughly two thousand years that we can document. Schisandra appears in the Shennong Bencao Jing, the oldest surviving Chinese materia medica, compiled around 200 AD but drawing on older oral tradition,

and it was placed in the top of its three ranks, the "superior" category reserved for things considered safe to take long term. It's stayed in Chinese, Korean and Japanese practice continuously ever since.

Who used it. In China, physicians and households across the north-east for the whole of that period. In Korea it's omija, and dried berries are steeped cold to make omija-cha, a pink drink you can still buy in any Seoul market. In Japan it's gomishi.

The Nanai and other indigenous peoples of the Amur river basin picked it wild and are recorded carrying the dried berries on long hunting trips. And in the 1940s-60s the Soviet Union took it seriously enough to put it through formal pharmacological research at Vladivostok and enter it in the Soviet state pharmacopoeia, one of the plants that Soviet scientists were studying when they coined the word "adaptogen" in 1947.

Which part of the plant is used ? Fruiting body

Strength / Specs ? 9% Schisandrin

Extraction method ? water.

What exactly do we get ? Each Capsule has 545mg of Schisandra extract (9% Schisandrin 49mg). Uptake blend 61mg 1:1:1: Black Pepper extract (10% piperine), Ginger extract (5% Ginerol), Cumin extract (10:1) per capsule. We sell all of our products in monthly packs so it's easy to buy and rebuy things that help us.