Triphala Powder

Details

Amla, bibhitaki and haritaki fruit, stones removed, weighed in at 1:1:1 and milled together in a temperature-controlled food-grade plant. Three ingredients and no fourth. Two things go wrong in this category and neither is visible in the jar. The first is heavy metals. Contamination of Indian herbal and ayurvedic products with lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium is documented, repeatedly, in published market surveys, and it arrives two ways: from soil and irrigation water on the growing side, and from processing equipment and mineral additions on the making side. A fruit powder should carry almost none of it. Every lot here is tested by ICP-MS for all four, and the tested figures are printed below beside the regulatory limits rather than summarised as tested for heavy metals. The second is that a jar of brown powder is unfalsifiable without an assay. Stones ground back in add weight and no fruit. Rice flour and starch bulk it out. Marc, the exhausted residue left after a manufacturer has extracted the fruit for something else, is sold on as powder and looks identical. None of that is visible, and none of it is detectable by eye, smell or taste. What settles it is a marker assay, so every lot is assayed for total tannins and for gallic acid, and spent material fails that test immediately.

• Total tannins 34.2 percent by weight, as gallic acid equivalent, against an internal release floor of 30.0 percent. Tested per lot
• Free gallic acid 1.8 percent and chebulinic acid 2.4 percent by HPLC, which is the haritaki fingerprint and confirms the fruit was not previously extracted
• Lead 0.42 mg per kg against a 10.0 limit, arsenic 0.11 against 3.0, cadmium 0.06 against 0.3, mercury below the 0.02 quantification limit against 1.0. By ICP-MS, every lot
• Acid-insoluble ash below 1.0 percent, which is the test for grit, sand and stone dust
• Starch not detected. That is the test for rice flour and maize flour bulking
• Fruit pulp only. Stones and seeds are removed before milling, not after
• Equal parts by weight, 1:1:1, weighed in at the blender. That is a formulation control rather than something a laboratory can confirm afterwards, and it is stated as such
• No anti-caking agent, no sweetener, no colour, no flavour, no excipient of any kind
• It is sour and sharply astringent, the colour shifts from lot to lot with the fruit, and it will clump in the monsoon because there is nothing in it to stop it
• A traditional herbal food, not a medicine. No claim is made here about what it does