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Tongkat Ali root, leaves, and bark extracts
For available Tongkat Ali extracts, and their prices, please see:
https://tongkatali.org/index-tongkat-ali-products.htm
Orders can be placed by writing to the email address below - in any language.
The efficacy (effectiveness of a pharmaceutical product) of tongkat ali has been established in numerous scientific studies. You may want to verify this through a search on the online version of the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health of the United States Government.
The website is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Try a search for: tongkat ali, or for Eurycoma longifolia (the scientific name of tongkat ali). You will gain access to the summaries or full texts of more than 200 scientific studies, most of which deal with the testosterone-enhancing properties of extracts of the plant.
Like any other plant, Eurycoma longifolia contains many dozens of unique chemical compounds. Plants produce these compounds not with the intention to provide humans with natural medicines to treat diseases, but as chemical defenses against herbivores, insects, and microbes. That some compounds can be used by humans with positive outcomes, is purely accidental.
Phytochemicals (plant chemicals) are loosely classified under some of the following categories: alkaloids (nitrogen-containing molecules; morphine, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine are all alkaloids), flavonoids (often acting as pigments), phenols (often produced by plants as their own insecticides; tetrahydrocannabinol is a phenolic terpenoid), saponins (soapy fluids, deliberately lowering the palatability for herbivores), tannins (astringents affecting animal tissue, a useful side effect of this phytochemical defense is its application in tanneries, working on leather).
"37 compounds mainly including triterpenoids with the quassinoid skeleton and ß-carboline alkaloids have been isolated from the roots of Eurycoma longifolia Jack (EL), which has been used as traditional medicine." [Chemical constituents...]
"Four new phenolic acids, eurylophenolosides A (1) and B (2), eurylolignanosides A (3) and B (4), along with twelve known isolates were obtained from ... E. longifolia roots by a combination of various chromatographic methods and spectral techniques." [Bioactive Constituents from the Roots of Eurycoma longifolia]
Apart from structural plant tissue such as fiber, or storage compounds such as carbs, phytochemical are almost always species-specific. This means that for the roughly 420,000 plant species (of which some 370,000 are flowering plants), the chemical composition of each species is unique.
Plant roots play an important role in human nutrition. But this applies almost exclusively to roots used by plants as storage vesicles. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, beet roots, and carrots are all examples of tuberous roots, consumed by humans for their starches.
Some tuberous roots also have medicinal value, and are applied as herbal sexual enhancements. A classical example is butea superba, the rare forest vine, used by Thai men to boost testosterone and libido. Demand for butea superba is what prompted our Indonesian company, Sumatra Pasak Bumi, to expand to Thailand.
In a study for University of Technology, Malaysia, Samsiah Jusoh et al analyzed the content of Eurycoma longofolia's most prominent quassinoid, eurycomanone, in various parts of the plant: "The highest concentrations of eurycomanone ... were 6.0568 (leaves), 0.1415 (twigs), 0.0365 (top of stems), 0.0633 (middle of stems), 0.0673 (bottom of stems), 0.3533 (roots) and 5.1137 mcg/mL (root barks)." [Source: Eurycoma longifolia]
Please note that the concentration of eurycomanone in leaves is almost 20 times higher than in roots. Root bark has a high concentration, too, but root bark is difficult to process because it is often infested with fungi, and does not preserve well on the way from a forest to a processing facility, hundreds of kilometers away.
In a review of tongkat ali's ethnobotany and pharmacological importance, Bhat and Karim (2010) stated: " The plant parts [not just the roots] have been traditionally used for its antimalarial, aphrodisiac, anti-diabetic, antimicrobial and anti-pyretic activities..." [Source: Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia Jack): a review on its ethnobotany and pharmacological importance]
If ethnobotanical resources attest to the use of tongkat ali leaves, as well as root, and if scientific sources proove that active ingredients, especially alkaloids, are present in higher percentages in leaves than in roots, why, then, are tongkat ali leaf extracts so hard to find on the Internet.
Already more than a decade ago, we published an extensive botanical documentation on the plant. See the photographic evidence below. More than 95 percent of the online tongkat ali traders, especially on Amazon, have never seen a tongkat ali tree, and haven't ever touched a tongkat ali root. They buy some capsules and powders of which they are told that it is tongkat ali, mostly from China, which has the cheapest prices for about everything, and then they resell retail as 1:200 with a mark-up.
Their warez are not 1:200, and usually not even tongkat ali at all.
There is no tongkat ali in China. And sending tongkat ali to China, even just retail, is very difficult. Chinese customs aren't like North American customs. Packages of any kind are actually inspected. Orders, for example for 10 bottles, we have to ship as 5 times 2 bottles, or sometimes even 10 times 1 bottle, as anything larger would be suspected to be a trade item, and that would need extensive documentation (as a matter of red tape to keep foreign products out).
And that was before Covid. Since 2020, sending anything to China has become messy.
Shipping out of Indonesia has also become much more difficult. The Indonesian postal services, Pos Indonesia, no longer ship packages to most parts of the world, and for merchandise depend on a hook-up with DHL. Furthermore, Indonesia now prohibits the export of unprocessed forestry products (of which tongkat ali is one). Thus, even for a bulk order of 1000 kg, we have to package in bottles of 100 grams so that, technically, this is a processed retail product.
You are probably not interested in these finer points of the tongkat ali commerce. But they are cited as a element of authenticity. We know what we are trading.
The range of tongkat ali extracts sold by Tongkatali.org has evolved over the past 25 years, mostly driven by new research. As of end of 2021, we still sell the manually-extracted 1:200 root extract (brown labels) that we have selling - unchanged - since 1998. We also sell a 1:200 extract, produced with modern equipment (beige labels). We also sell a full-spectrum 1:200 extract (maroon labels) that uses roots, stems, leaves, and bark. And we sell an enhanced 1:200 extract (olive labels), which uses root and leaves, resulting in higher contents of alkaloids and eurycomanone.
On the other hand, some users who have been using our extracts for more than a decade swear by the old manual extraction process. The old manual extraction process uses more heat, and it requires then constant attention of a technician for three days. Manually extracted products are therefore more expensive than their machine-extracted counterparts. Because more heat is used in the manual extraction process, the resulting extracts are darker.
While our decision to maintain the labor-intensive manual extraction process was triggered simply by customer request, we have recently come across a scientific source that indicates that the alkaloid fraction of active ingredients indeed requires a temperature of 100 degree Celsius to be dissolved: "... the concentration of alkaloids was increased when the roots of E. longifolia were extracted at 100°C." [Source: Leaf and stem extracts from Eurycoma longifolia jack ]
The US is the only country outside Southeast Asia where tongkat ali can be freely traded. One kind of restrictions, or another, apply to the rest of the world. In Western Europe and Canada, the plant's proven testosterone-enhancing capabilities put it, wrongly, on par with steroids. This classification is wrong because tongkat ali is not an exogenous anabolic steroid. It does the opposite from steroids, but has a similar effect: steroids shut down the body's own testosterone synthesis, with all kinds of iff effects; tongkat ali stimulates the body to increase its own testosterone synthesis capacities by acting on the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis.
Tried it, without convincing results? 90 percent of all tongkat ali on the market, and 95 percent on Amazon, is fake anyway. And if a tongkat ali root extract didn't do it, then you may want to try an extract is higher on tongkat ali alkaloids by extracting the leaves as well as the roots.
Tongkat Ali Documentation
Active Plant Ingredients Used for Medicinal Purposes, US Forest Service, https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/ingredients.shtml
Bhat, R; Karim, AA (2010) Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia Jack): a review on its ethnobotany and pharmacological importance, Fitoterapia, Volume 81(7), Pages 669-79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fitote.2010.04.006
Brinckmann, J; Brendler, T, Tongkat Ali Eurycoma longifolia Family: Simaroubaceae, American Botanical Council, Issue: 122, Page: 6-16, https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/122/table-of-contents/hg122-herbpro-tongatali/
Chua, L S; Segaran, S; Wong, HJ (2021) LC-PDA-MS/MS-Based Characterization of Key Phytochemicals in Eurycoma Longifolia Roots Journal Chromatographical Science, Volume 21;59(7) Paes 659-669, https://doi.org/10.1093/chromsci/bmab041
Jusoh, S; Ghani, RA; Kadir, WRWA; Ishak, MF (2015), Phytochemical Assessment of Multi-locational Tongkat Ali(Eurycoma longifolia) In Peninsular Malaysia, Propelling Science and Technology Through Natural Products Vol. 2, Vol. 77, No. 3 https://doi.org/10.11113/jt.v77.6011
Ruan, J; Li, Z; Zhang, Y; Chen, Y; Liu, M; Han, L; Zhang, Y; Wang, T (2019), Bioactive Constituents from the Roots of Eurycoma longifolia, Molecules, Volume 24(17) Page 3157, https://dx.doi.org/10.3390%2Fmolecules24173157
Zakaria, N; Mohd, K.S.; Hamil, M.S.R.; Memon, A.H.; Asmawi, M.Z.; Ismail, Z (2017) Characterization of primary and secondary metabolites of leaf and stem extracts from Eurycoma longifolia jack, Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 2S, https://doi.org/10.4314/jfas.v9i2s.41
TONGKATALI.ORG - Medan - North Sumatra - Indonesia
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