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What are the active ingredients of tongkat ali
By Serge Kreutz
Version 1.1, July 2010
I understand that in recent months, a Malaysian producer of tongkat ali extract has heavily promoted their product with claims of a scientific standardization.
As if this were of scientific relevance, they stated that their product is composed of 40% glycosaponins, 22% eurypeptides and 30% polysaccharides.
Judging from the wide circulation of their product, it seems to be easy indeed to fool people by using scientific-sounding terms.
The active components of tongkat ali (Eurycoma longifolia Jack) have of course been scientifically established.
There is an excellent, impartial, not product-oriented scientific source on the Internet:
http://www.ics.trieste.it/MAPs/MedicinalPlants_Plant.aspx?id=613
You can read a printscreen of the relevant section of the above-mentioned page here:
ICS UNIDO Medicinal and Aromatic Plants
You can debunk yourself the pseudoscience of "40% glycosaponins, 22% eurypeptides and 30% polysaccharides".
To start with, do the following:
On your browser, load the page:
http://www.ics.trieste.it/MAPs/MedicinalPlants_Plant.aspx?id=613
Using Internet Explorer, click Edit / Find and run a search for the following terms, one by one: glycosaponins, saponins, eurypeptides, peptides, polysaccharide.
Only the term "polysaccharide" is found on the page, listing the active components of Eurycoma longifolia Jack (tongkat ali), but NOT as an active chemical
Google Books now makes it possible to scout scientific books for references. I did this for the term Eurycoma longifolia and found a chemical dictionary. It doesn't only give the scientific names for the active ingredients of Eurycoma longifolia (tongkat ali) but the chemical formulas as well.
The printscreen here:
Dictionary of Natural Products
The chemical constituents of Eurycoma longifolia (tongkat ali), especially those that increase testosterone production, are also mentioned here:
http://jwc1.mc.ntu.edu.tw/cpj/Material/53-2/532097abs.htm