Field Notes
Two or three short notes each week. One benefit, one bit of science, one way to use it.
One small orange berry, over 190 bioactive compounds. Here is what's inside.
Most fruits carry a handful of identified bioactive compounds. Chromatographic studies of sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) have catalogued more than 190. Here is the full inventory, grouped by family — with a note on the science behind the count.
Two peer-reviewed reviews spent years compiling everything modern science has identified inside Hippophae rhamnoides. Read together, they explain why the berry is amber, why it is oily, and why it keeps.
Why the orange in a Ladakhi sea buckthorn isn't decoration — it's chemistry.
The vitamin C in sea buckthorn arrives inside a whole-fruit matrix — quieter on the tongue than a citrus glass, and part of a broader nutrient profile.
The rarest of the omegas, and why your face oil quietly cares about it.
Why a small orange berry keeps showing up in neuro-nutrition research.
Most bright fruits are bright because of their sugar. Sea buckthorn is one of the few where the colour is not the sugar. A note on the fruit's natural composition.
General nutrition frameworks recognise a small stack of daily inputs — potassium, magnesium, healthy fats, flavonoids — as part of a heart-friendly diet. Where sea buckthorn fits into that picture, as a food.
Sea buckthorn is one of the rare plants that carries all four principal omegas — 3, 6, 7 and 9 — plus plant sterols and antioxidants, distributed across the pulp and the seed. Here is what nutrition literature says about each, as a matter of food composition.
The liver works hard all day. Certain flavonoids, antioxidants and fatty acids feature in its everyday nutrition — sea buckthorn happens to carry several of them.
The kidneys are the body's quietest engineers. What they need, mostly, is not a supplement. It is water — and the right small things dissolved inside it.
Vitamin C exists in nature inside whole fruits, alongside a broader family of companion compounds. Sea buckthorn is one of those fruits — worth reading about on its own terms, not in contrast to anything.
Collagen supplements are everywhere. Very few of them work. Here is what actually builds collagen — and where to find it in a berry.
Your skin and your gut are the same conversation. A small orange berry from Ladakh speaks both dialects.
The thyroid works from a small kitchen of trace minerals and antioxidants. Sea buckthorn carries some of them — as a food, not a treatment.
Hair fall is often a slow signal from the body. Here's what it's usually asking for.
Modern science began describing sea buckthorn in molecular terms only recently. The Himalayan medical traditions — treating it as a rasayana food — were describing it many centuries ago in a completely different grammar.
How a caffeine-free leaf tea from Ladakh became a quiet way to close the day.
Sea buckthorn grows across three continents. But only one variety, in one valley, carries this much of everything.
Every seasonal shift is a small test of the immune system. Here is the food the mountains have leaned on for centuries.
Every bottle begins in a valley in Ladakh, in a pair of hands that has been doing this work since long before we existed.
The food-grade method behind our oils — explained without the chemistry textbook.
