Findings about
Goji berries

As you probably are aware, goji is the recent hot
topic. Imports of goji berries from China have exploded. In addition,
dealers also import goji juice into Europe. It has been mostly marketed as
Himalayan goji berries or Tibetan goji
berries. I admit that I am goji fan as well, so I have bought goji berries from
healthy food stores, supermarkets such as Tesco, but I think they are too
expensive from these places. So I advice looking for online
retailer for goji berries. In the mean time, I have done a lot of
research about goji, and would like to share with you.

As goji berries have been grown and consumed in China for a few thousand years,
many research papers one can find about goji berries have been written by
Chinese scientists. If you look up the medical and scientific papers
repository (PubMed), you could easily find around 50 articles about goji
berries. But I have to say that most of such papers are written Chinese,
though they might have short abstracts written in English. I indeed found
one of such studies discussing goji berries’ capability on anti-cancer.
It shows a significant improvement in patients who took cancer drugs and goji
berry extract as opposed to the patients who took cancer drugs only.
Following are the discussions on a few aspects of research on goji
berries:

Toxicity: Research about goji berries in the past had caused concerns
about its content of tropine (toxic element) . In September 2006,
scientists at the University of Graz in Austria analyzed Chinese goji berries.
They have found some trace of atropine, but they were far below toxic levels.

Anti-aging Effects: In 2006, Chinese scientists compared the
anti-oxidant levels between goji berries and vitamin C. They did the tests on
older mice. They found that polysaccharides from goji berries helped
to compensate for “the decline in antioxidant capacity, immune function and
antioxidant enzymes”. The polysaccharides were also found to fight free
radicals. These studies are very encouraging.

Goji Berries and Diabetes: In 2004 the scientists at Wuhan University
(CHINA) have found that goji berries extract has obviously increased HDL,
or “good,” cholesterol in the rabbits and a reduction in blood glucose
level. Therefore nowadays it is regarded that goji berries have anti-diabetes effect.