Goji's superfruit fame rests partly on a man said to have lived 256 years
One marketing booklet claimed a Chinese man named Li Qing Yuen ate wolfberries daily and lived from 1677 to 1933. That tale, along with a false claim about cancer research, helped turn an old ingredient of Chinese cooking into a Western superfruit around 2000. Regulators have been pushing back ever since.
Goji, or wolfberry, is the fruit of two closely related boxthorns in the nightshade family, Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense, native to East Asia. The English word goji approximates the Chinese name gouqi and has been used only since about 2000. Wolfberry may stem from a mix-up: someone likely assumed Lycium came from the Greek for wolf, when it actually refers to Lycia, an ancient region of Anatolia. Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditional medicine have used the fruit since at least the 3rd century AD, and cooks add the berries for sweetness and eat the young leaves as a vegetable.
The superfruit boom leaned on dubious stories. The long-lived Li Qing Yuen came from a 2003 booklet by Earl Mindell, who also promoted anti-cancer claims. In 2007 the CBC programme Marketplace caught Mindell falsely claiming that Memorial Sloan-Kettering had shown wolfberry juice could prevent 75 percent of breast cancers. A 2009 class action against his employer, FreeLife, ended in a 2010 settlement, and in 2019 and 2020 the FDA sent warning letters to two distributors marketing goji as a treatment for disease.
The actual evidence is thin. The pulp is rich in carotenoids and polysaccharides, which make up about 30 percent of it, and a small analysis of four studies in healthy Chinese adults found slightly lower triglycerides and higher HDL cholesterol after 4 to 16 weeks, but the quality was low. Laboratory tests suggest goji tea might interfere with how the liver processes some medicines, including warfarin.
Most goji comes from China, where 2023 output supported a wolfberry economy worth about 29 billion yuan, some 61 percent of it from Ningxia plantations along the Yellow River. The FDA has seized some Chinese imports for high pesticide residues, and conventional farming on the Tibetan Plateau makes organic Himalayan branding dubious. Britain has grown the plant since the Duke of Argyll introduced it in the 1730s, mostly as a hedge.
Source: Goji
