Let us talk about Giloy (Guduchi)

With Covid pandemic and uncontrolled noise on social media about herbal remedies to boost immunity, there is rampant raise of medical advice from trusted and untrusted .

For the first wave, It was about Kadhas/Kashayas. This wave it is Giloy.

I have seen hundreds of people hunting for various forms of Giloy products - like - Giloy churna, Giloy leaves powder, Giloy juice, Giloy tablets and even raw dried Gilroy plants . It’s not their fault, this information is everywhere on the web promising miraculous effects immediately - like reducing diabetes, improving immunity to even increasing oxygen levels. Please note there is no evidence of Giloy helping in increasing oxygen levels

What concerns me, majority of the information is not coming from qualified professionals.

So let’s see how Gilroy needs to be consumed as per traditional ayurveda -

Giloy as per Ayurveda - should be consumed in the form of Giloy Sattva - That’s the prescribed dosage form. Sattva is essentially a dried aqueous extract of the Gilroy stems and is extremely time consuming and complicated process to prepare it . For a modern explanation - Giloy Satva is nothing but an edible plant starch.

There has been too much information saying - one can eat Giloy leaves, Giloy leaves Kadha, plain steam powder etc . So let’s go through a few publications and see what they say.

The first one is from Indian Medicinal Plants, an illustrated dictionary by C.P. Khare - It suggests that starch from stem & roots has the medicinal properties. Note - it’s stem and not leaves. Second - the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia for India suggests that one can consumer stem powder and nothing else.

In market currently Giloy is available as sattva powder, and sattva tablets. Along with these there are various other variants like Giloy powder and Giloy juice. So when buying anything off the market, make sure you pick sativa based products only and generally avoid modern dosage forms like juices. To make a juice one generally adds some proprietary syrup/juice bases with out any details about what goes into this proprietary base. Why ingest something into your body, when you are not sure what it is? 

Going back to basics, Why did you decide that you need to consume a certain herb, probably you had some ailment and you learnt that consuming this particular herb can help you with the ailment. Talk to an Ayurvedic doctor to learn in which form and  how long you should consume a herb. I am sure you don’t want to consume something on your own if it is going to impact your health. If you don’t know any one, contact us here and we will guide you for free.

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