Mangosteen - it's a hell of a fruit but I don't think it'll cure cancer or raise the dead.

I was in a Chinese restaurant the other day with some of my colleagues. It was a lunch buffet. It wasn't one of those horrible ones with 500 choices where every dish is as bland as the last. It was a good one. This was really really REALLY good Chinese food.

One of my co-workers brought her plate of fruit over to my boss. She held up a piece and asked what it was. It turned out to be dragon fruit also known as pitaya.



I thought "cool - another new fruit to try" and then I asked my boss "have you ever had mangosteen?"

"Mangosteen? What's that?

I told him what I knew.

"It's reddish purplish and you peel the skin off to get at the white sweet fruit that has the texture of a green grape without the peel. It is very sweet and delicious. It is sort of like a pomogranate in that it is a lot of work and a bit of mess to get at the fruit and - I would say - well worth the work and mess."

They look like this.

And my other co-worker added "I have alway wanted to try one. I have also heard they are very good for you - you can buy mangosteen stuff in health food stores."

Health food stores? I remember buying them at little fruit shops in Chinatown in Calgary,Vancouver and Toronto and it has been a long time since I have been by to find some. Health food stores? It's fruit - no better or worse for you than apples and plums you buy at Safeway or the Co-op (a Calgary grocery chain).

Then I did a Google search on mangosteen.

Holy crap! Everybody is trying to make a buck off these things. They're flogging the juice and dried mangosteen as some kind of miracle elixar. And in typical internet fashion, the marketing is linked up everywhere. In fact I am betting my text ads at the bottom of this page pick up on this post and I too will - against my will - become a shill for some snake oil mangosteen salesman.

I did some Googling and I found a great article The Mangosteen Myth.

Here's a quote

I investigated mangosteen earlier this year.There is a teensy bit of basic science (test tube studies finding that mangosteen, like ten thousand plants, has antioxidant, antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral actions) but ZERO meaningful clinical research that shows it has any useful action in human beings. Mangosteen juice is just a random product-of-the-year sort of thing, a marketing initiative like so many others, conceived in the spirit of profit, and no more likely to produce any special health benefits than any other plantchosen at random out the botanical universe.

In the famous Mel Brooks 2000 year old man sketch, Mel calls the nectarine "a hell of a fruit." I would say the same about mangosteen. (It also has a hell of a name - like a Polynesian Jewish guy!)

My advice, go to an Asian fruit shop in your local Chinatown and shell out to try it. (It is rather expensive.) It is yummy.

Miracle fruit?

I think not.