Like so many other pairs of foes over history, the silkworm and white mulberry are locked in a dance of chemical warfare. But what's bad for the intended target can sometimes work wonders on us, as long as we use it appropriately.
Throughout the animal kingdom, approaches to self-defense are conventionally reduced to the same two basic options: fight or flight. Plants, rooted as they are to whatever's below them, never got the choice. A mulberry tree cannot outrun a caterpillar. A turmeric rhizome cannot kick a soil fungus. A rosemary bush on a Mediterranean hillside cannot crawl into the shade when the endless summer sun starts frying its cellular machinery. Captive audiences, edible from root tip to leaf edge, plants have spent their entire existence surrounded by things that want to eat them, infect them, or burn them.
So, just like Walter White, when confronted with an inescapable problem, they became chemists. [1] Aggressive, inventive, persistent chemists.
What follows is the story of the longest war waged on Earth, an eternal battle that has filled the plant kingdom with some of the most sophisticated molecules ever synthesized, and why a surprising number of them do something in your body too. If you've ever wondered why a leaf extract can slow your carbohydrate digestion or why the same molecule that gets you through Monday morning can poison the insect eating it, the answers all stem from the same fact: none of these molecules were made for you. They were made for war. You're just close enough to ground zero to feel them.
THE PROBLEMS OF PLANTHOOD
Despite the bucolic ideals conjured by landscape art and the green new deal, being a plant would probably be a bit annoying. Without a bit of wind to sway you to and fro, you can't really move, you can't flee, and you absolutely cannot hide. You have no teeth, no claws, and no immune cells traversing your veins the way white blood cells patrol ours. Meanwhile the world is full of insects, fungi, bacteria, nematodes, grazing herbivores, and, for the last blink of an evolutionary era, humans with harvesting baskets. Every mouth among them sees you as lunch.
What plants have instead of legs and fangs is biochemistry, and they are extravagantly good at it. Every plant runs 2 production lines. The first keeps it alive and growing (sugars, amino acids, the machinery of photosynthesis); chemists call this primary metabolism. The second line keeps it from being eaten, infected, or fried, and its products are called secondary metabolites: this name sorely undersells the importance of secondary metabolites, because, for an organism that cannot run away, this second line is a matter of life and death.
Science has catalogued hundreds of thousands of plant compounds, and nobody can give you a firm number for the secondary metabolites alone, because the count climbs every year and shifts by a factor of 2 or 3 depending on who is doing the counting. [2] More than 10,000 alkaloids, the nitrogen-containing family [3] that includes nicotine, caffeine, and morphine. Tens of thousands of terpenoids, from pine scent to rubber. Thousands of phenolics, the family that includes most of the pigments and tannins in your diet. Each began as a biochemical variation tested against successive volleys of live ammunition: herbivores, pathogens, competitors, drought, ultraviolet radiation, heat. The useful ones survived the trial and, over millions of years, were refined into an extraordinary chemical arsenal.
That last part matters. A pharmaceutical company screens candidate molecules for a decade or two before one reaches you. A plant lineage screens its candidate molecules against caterpillars, molds, and drought for geological ages, and the failures are not written up in a journal: the failures are extinct.
A family that fights dirty
ARMS AND ALARMS
Plant defense comes in 2 basic operating modes. Some weapons are constitutive, meaning always on: tannins sitting in the leaf, alkaloids stored in the bark, canals of latex [4] running through the veins like a booby-trapped plumbing system. Other weapons are induced, meaning built to order when an attack begins.
In 1972, two scientists showed that wounding tomato and potato leaves makes the plant flood its tissues with protease inhibitors, molecules that jam the digestive enzymes of whatever is chewing. The plant literally responds to being bitten by making itself harder to digest. [5] The alarm signal that coordinates this, a hormone called jasmonate, is one of the busiest switchboards in plant biology. It is named after jasmine, whose famous perfume is built on the same family of molecules, which means the scent rising off a cup of jasmine tea is a close cousin of a battle siren. And the alarm can be rung on purpose: researchers spray methyl jasmonate on crops to trick them into loading up on defense compounds before harvest, a fire drill with no fire [6] , and a preview of why growing conditions matter so much for the potency of everything in this series.
The engineering can get properly vicious: cabbage and its relatives run a two-part weapon that biologists, with uncharacteristic flair, call the mustard oil bomb: a harmless storage compound (a glucosinolate) kept in one cellular compartment, and an activating enzyme (myrosinase) kept in another, the way epoxy stays inert until its two components are mixed together. As long as the leaf is intact, nobody is the wiser, but the moment a caterpillar’s jaws crush the tissue, the two compounds mix and the bite itself detonates a burst of pungent isothiocyanates, the same chemistry that makes wasabi feel like a personal attack and contributes to red maca's antioxidant properties. The plant didn't exactly poison its leaf: it made the caterpillar manufacture the toxin by biting it. And the bomb travels far beyond the cabbage patch: moringa, cabbage’s tree-sized tropical cousin, carries its own version, a signature glucosinolate sitting on the detonator.
Or take nicotine, which we tend to think of as a human vice rather than what it actually is, a broad-spectrum insect neurotoxin. A group of researchers engineered wild tobacco plants that could no longer make nicotine and planted them back in their native Utah habitat. Herbivores stripped the nicotine-free plants at dramatically higher rates than their armed neighbors [7] . That's about as close as ecology gets to a controlled weapons trial.
Caffeine might be the most instructive compound of all, because it shows 1 molecule running 2 completely different jobs at 2 different doses. In leaves and seeds, at high concentrations, caffeine paralyzes and kills insect larvae. In the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers, at trace concentrations, the same molecule sharpens honeybee memory so pollinators remember the flower and come back. [8] Weapon at one dose, Starbucks at another. Hold that thought, because the difference between those 2 doses is going to matter later.
And then there is latex, the defense instrument that leads to one of the darling compounds in this article. Roughly 1 in 10 flowering plant species carries canals of sticky, toxin-loaded fluid that exudes from any wound. White mulberry belongs to this club, and its latex carries a payload we will meet properly in a moment.
Rubber tapping
COMBATIVE COEVOLUTION
For much of the 20th century, secondary metabolites were dismissed as metabolic waste: chemical junk that plants produced and simply had no convenient way to excrete. In 1959, Gottfried Fraenkel turned that assumption on its head. In a Science paper whose title was a gift to posterity, The Raison d’Être of Secondary Plant Substances, [9] he argued that these supposed waste products were anything but: they were central to determining which insects could, and could not, eat which plants.
Five years later, Paul Ehrlich [10] and Peter Raven took the idea to an evolutionary scale. By modern standards their method looks almost comically simple: no experiment at all, essentially two maps laid on top of one another, butterfly lineages over plant chemistry. The result was a vast comparative picture of butterfly species and their relationships with the larval host plants upon which they feed. The striking pattern that emerged was that butterflies did not simply follow plant taxonomy in their meal choices: even the most closely related plants could host very different butterflies if their secondary chemistry differed, while plants with little genetic relationship but similar convergent secondary chemistry could easily be exploited by the same butterfly groups. The insects, in other words, were far more concerned with chemistry than botanical family trees. And what looked like a map of feeding preferences was actually the fossilized outline of an arms race.
Ehrlich and Raven described the evolutionary engine: [11] a plant lineage that evolved a novel chemical defense could temporarily escape its herbivores, opening ecological space in which it could diversify. Then, sooner or later, some herbivore lineage could crack the defense, colonize the newly accessible buffet, and diversify in turn. Repeat for hundreds of millions of years and you get both the staggering variety of plant chemistry and the staggering variety of insects. Not peace, ever. Just ebb and flow, and brief shifts in who has the upper hand.
This model, later developed as escape-and-radiate coevolution, transformed Fraenkel's insight from an explanation of host choice into a mechanism capable of shaping biodiversity itself: the chemicals mattered because plants and herbivores were continually evolving in response to one another.
The Rules of Engagement
Ehrlich and Raven's proposed evolutionary engine, in field manual form:
1. Plants are being eaten. This kills the plant, or at the very least ruins its vibes.
Herbivory creates an incentive for plants to develop chemical deterrents.
2. A plant lineage evolves a novel secondary compound.
Existing herbivores that happily fed on the plant are now flummoxed, either unable to eat it effectively or paying a serious physiological price when they do. They avoid the plant, eat less of it, or suffer the consequences.
3. The defended plant lineage enters a relatively enemy-free space.
Freed from some of its herbivore pressure, the lineage can expand into newly available ecological space and, over time, diversify.
4. Eventually an herbivore lineage evolves a way around the chemical defense.
Maybe detoxification, tolerance, sequestration, altered host-recognition machinery, etc. In plain terms, subterfuge and sabotage. Life, uh, finds a way.
5. That herbivore lineage now has access to a relatively underexploited food resource.
So now it can spread and diversify.
6. Repeat for geological time.
Lather, rinse, repeat for the next few hundred million years. There are no conditions of victory, only attrition.
Counterstrikes
The counter-moves invented by the herbivores are just as clever as the weapons. In a paper literally entitled Disarming the Mustard Oil Bomb, we read how the diamondback moth learned to defuse brassica's mustard oil bomb with a gut enzyme that desulfates glucosinolates before they can detonate. [12] Monarch butterflies went further. Milkweed defends itself with cardenolides, toxins aimed at the sodium-potassium pump: a tiny protein embedded in the membrane of virtually every animal cell, endlessly trading sodium out for potassium in to keep the cell electrically charged. That charge is what lets nerves fire, muscles contract, and hearts keep time, and maintaining it burns up to 20% of your resting energy. [13] Shut the pumps down and the lights go out everywhere at once, which is exactly what cardenolides do. Monarchs evolved 3 mutations in that pump, became resistant and utterly unconcerned, and then, in one of the animal kingdom's single most gangster moves, started stockpiling the plant’s own poison in their bodies as a defense against birds. A blue jay that eats a monarch vomits and learns its lesson. [14] In 2019, researchers used CRISPR to install the monarch’s 3 mutations into ordinary fruit flies, and the flies became cardenolide-resistant, poison-storing “monarch flies [15] ”. The war is so real you can now replay it, mutated round of ammunition by round of ammunition, in a lab.
For how long have plants and animals been waging this protracted tit for tat of novel molecules and genetic adaptation to circumvent them? Plants colonized land roughly 470 million years ago [16] , and the fossil record shows arthropods (primitive millipedes, mites, and other creepy-crawling pioneers of terrestrial herbivory) eating them within a few tens of millions of years; [17] by around 410 million years ago [18] , entire fossilized food webs at the Rhynie Chert site in Scotland preserve the droppings to show it. [19] So call it a 400-million-year war, give or take a few million years. It long predates dinosaurs. It predates flowers by well over 250 million years. And it predates, by a margin that should keep marketers humble, every ancient civilization whose secrets the supplement industry claims to have rediscovered.
Surviving the sky
SIEGES AND SUNBURN
So far, every assailant in this war has had a mouth. But insects with mandibles are just the most photogenic of a plant's enemies, and arsenals exist to target the less obvious pests as well. There are 2 more battlefields, and they play by different rules, since the most insidious assailants don't bite at all.
Against enemies with no nervous system to poison and no jaws to take a bite, plants switched tactics entirely: soak the tissue itself in standing antimicrobials, punch holes in microbial membranes, and sabotage the machinery of the microbes themselves. Turmeric packs curcumin into its rhizome, where it helps ward off fungus and bacteria. Berberine proved so useful on this front that plants invented it twice [20] , once in the buttercup order and once, separately, among the citrus relatives, using enzymes with nothing in common, and some of its makers (including the eponymous Berberis spp.) ship it with an accomplice: a second molecule, harmless on its own, that jams the pump bacteria would otherwise use to spit the berberine back out. [21] Combination therapy, ages before anyone wore a lab coat. Berberine even moonlights with the sun, becoming dramatically more lethal under near-ultraviolet and blue light [22] , which brings us to the second front.
Our last enemy isn't alive at all. Ultraviolet radiation, drought, wind, frost: physics lays siege to a plant every single day, and this front has a property no herbivore war ever had. The sun does not adapt. There is no counter-move to wait for, no resistance gene coming, so this is not an arms race at all. Instead, it is a permanent siege, and siege chemistry looks different: less poison, more infrastructure. When harsh light and dehydration flood a leaf with reactive oxygen (unstable oxygen byproducts that shred membranes, proteins, and DNA, molecular shrapnel, in short), plants deploy chemical fire brigades. In the young leaves at the tip of a rosemary branch, carnosic acid can reach 10% of dry weight: dry those leaves out, and roughly 1 gram in every 10 that remain is this single molecule. [23] It quenches that shrapnel on a kamikaze mission, self-immolating into a chain of spent derivatives. Rosemary bushes hold about half as much carnosic acid in high summer as in midwinter [24] , and in droughted Mediterranean plants the missing half turns up as spent oxidation products [25] , which points less to making less than to spending faster. Rosemary’s mint-family cousin lemon balm makes the same bet with a different coin, pouring up to 8% of its leaf’s dry weight into rosmarinic acid, a phenolic shield with a side career as an insect deterrent. Maca has to erect its ramparts at an elevation of 4,000 meters in the Andes, under a reported daily UV index of 11 to 19 [26] (11 is where the WHO scale gives up and stops counting [27] , since everything above it is one open-ended “extreme”; the worst summer's day of your life in London or New York was probably a 9). The siege does not even end at the waterline. Bladderwrack, the brown seaweed behind the iodine on our label, spends every low tide baking in air and sun, holding a standing stock of phlorotannins, tannin-like phenolics that screen UV and get cranked up further when grazing snails move in. Its kelp relatives run the strangest defense of all: they hoard iodide as an antioxidant and vent it under stress, vigorously enough to help seed clouds over coastlines; bladderwrack keeps a smaller store of the same chemistry and releases it slowly across the whole low tide. Antioxidants were veterans of this war for geological ages before they ended up darlings of modern nutrition science: they are simply molecules that help extinguish oxidative fires inside a plant's own tissue. The plants that synthesized them were never chasing a label claim. They were just surviving the sky.
FROM DEFENSE TO MEDICINE
CONVENIENT CROSSFIRE
So plants built up a proper arsenal aimed at deterring insects, fungi, and bacteria. Why would those weapons do anything, especially something beneficial, in a human?
Because evolution is thrifty, and life's basic building blocks and machinery are old. The enzymes that you and a caterpillar use to digest sugar are not even close relatives. Insects and mammals came at the job from different protein families, and caterpillars went further still, lifting part of their sucrose machinery from bacteria outright. What they share is not ancestry. It is a target: every one of those enzymes has to grip the same sugar the same way, and a molecule shaped like that sugar caught mid-reaction jams all of them. The nerve receptors nicotine was aimed at exist in your brain. The sodium-potassium pump that milkweed sabotages beats in your heart cells, which is exactly why a cardenolide from another plant lineage, digoxin from foxglove, spent decades as a mainstream heart medication. The pain receptor that makes a mammal regret biting a chili pepper, TRPV1, is one of the receptors [28] that lights up when black pepper’s piperine lands on your tongue. [29] And piperine itself evolved as an insect deterrent; [30] it also happens to jam 2 of the systems [31] your gut uses to expel foreign molecules, the CYP3A4 enzyme that chemically dismantles them [32] and the P-glycoprotein pump that shovels them back out into the intestine, which is why it's so effective at increasing the absorption of other compounds: piperine holds the door open long enough for them to get through.
Evolutionary biologists have made the point bluntly: most plant compounds that do anything interesting to humans are anti-herbivore chemistry finding its old targets in a new animal (Sullivan, Hagen & Hammerstein, Proc R Soc B, 2008).
The cleanest example we know of is found in white mulberry, whose latex is loaded with DNJ (1-deoxynojirimycin), a molecule that impersonates a sugar so convincingly that carbohydrate-digesting enzymes latch onto it and go AWOL, in full dereliction of their saccharide duties. A caterpillar that eats mulberry leaf gets its digestion jammed and, in the words of the researchers who worked it out, is forced onto a diet. [33] Your own gut-wall enzymes are similar enough that DNJ, at supplement doses, [34] modestly slows [35] the final step in digesting starch [36] and table sugar, too. [37] Same molecule, same trick, different target [38] , radically different dose. [39]
If your eyes are starting to cross at enzyme names, here is the whole section in one sentence: you and caterpillars are not running the same hardware so much as hardware with the same weak spot, and plant chemists have been aiming at that weak spot since before anything had even developed a spine.
CHOOSE YOUR TARGET
A WORD WE SHOULD SAY OUT LOUD: POISON
Rosemary and maca aside, whose shields were raised against the sun's fusillade of UV radiation rather than any mouth, this article has been describing poisons: molecules whose original job description was to ruin the day of whatever ate them. If that word makes you raise an eyebrow at your supplement shelf, good, it means you’re paying attention. But you can rest assured, confident in the wisdom of the oldest rule in pharmacology: poison is a matter of dose and target.
You drank a solution of insect neurotoxin this morning and called it coffee. You have eaten the mustard oil bomb, detonated, on sushi, and called it wasabi. Caffeine at leaf concentration kills a hornworm larva; caffeine at nectar concentration helps a bee remember a flower; caffeine at espresso concentration helps you remember a deadline. Alongside that caffeine, you or your coworker may have taken a dose of another insect neurotoxin, nicotine, conveniently rolled into little sticks that come 20 to a pack. Pure, concentrated nicotine is truly dangerous stuff; cigarettes dole it out in tiny doses, while the rest of the smoke kills you on a timeline of decades rather than minutes.
At the doses used in humans, we're not trying to recreate the chemical battlefield these molecules evolved for. We're exploiting the fact that some of the same molecular machinery exists within us, and that a compound capable of wrecking a pathway in one organism can modulate a related pathway in another. This, incidentally, is why we are boringly insistent about dosage on every ingredient page we write. A molecule with 400 million years of edge is not something to freestyle. Respect it, dose it like the science says, and it works for you instead of on you.
WHEN BARK GETS DARK
WHAT THIS CHANGES ABOUT READING A LABEL
Once you view the ingredients in your supplements as veterans of this neverending war, a few things snap into focus.
First, so many marketing tropes deserve retirement. Nobody needs “the ancient secrets of the Incas” when the truth about, e.g., red maca is older and better: by the time any human civilization noticed these plants, the molecules were veterans of 400 million years of the most ruthless product testing imaginable. Traditions are real and we honor them: Indigenous cultures all over the world spent generations learning what the plants described in this article could do, and we Westerners arrived late, holding their notes. [40] But traditions work because the chemistry is battle-tested and airtight, not the other way around.
Second, the war explains the flaws, not just the powers. Turmeric’s curcumin evolved in a waxy underground rhizome to repel microbes in the dark. Nothing about that job required being able to dissolve in water or survive a mammalian liver, and sure enough, it does neither, which is why raw curcumin famously barely reaches your bloodstream and why formulation matters more than dose (we wrote about this in our blog on bioavailability). A compound’s evolutionary job description predicts its behavior in your body, awkward parts included. Any brand that sells you the powers without the flaws is selling you half a molecule.
Third, honesty about scope. Not everything in a formula is a weapon. Minerals like zinc and chromium, amino acids like L-arginine, these are supplies, not munitions; your body simply uses them as raw material. Though we confess the war keeps annexing ingredients we had filed as civilians: L-citrulline turns out to be a desert plant’s drought shield, piling up in the leaves of wild Kalahari watermelons until it makes up roughly half of their free amino acids, and iodine, as we saw at low tide, is a seaweed’s antioxidant long before it is anyone’s thyroid mineral. This series tells war stories only where the war actually happened. When an ingredient’s story is “your body needs this and modern diets run it low”, we will just say that, because it is enough.
A FEATURE NOT A BUG
THE WAR STORIES COMING NEXT
Each of the compounds below gets its own deep dive. Consider this the theater map.
White mulberry and DNJ
A tree that defends its leaves with a sugar impostor, and the one insect in history that beat it: the silkworm, which evolved enzymes the impostor cannot fool. The full story of the leaf, the moth, and your after-lunch glucose curve.Turmeric and curcumin
The war underground: a sterile plant whose rhizome is its entire future, the pigment that helps guard it from soil fungi, and why a molecule built for that job is so useless in the human body without a helping hand in absorption.Rosemary and carnosic acid
The chapter where the enemy is physics. A Mediterranean shrub that survives brutal sun and drought by spending a molecule that burns itself up quenching cellular damage, one radical at a time.Ashwagandha and the withanolides
Steroid-like compounds that make insects lose their appetite, a root that smells like a horse, and what any of that has to do with your stress response.Barberry and berberine
The bitter yellow alkaloid that plants invented at least twice, and that ships with its own accomplice: a second molecule whose only job is to stop bacteria from pumping the first one out. A plant running combination therapy, millions of years before we named it.Red maca and macamides
Chemistry at 4,000 meters: extreme UV, frost, a cress cousin running the mustard oil playbook underground, and signature compounds that are partly finished, remarkably, in the drying sheds of the Andes.Black pepper and piperine
The finale, and the twist: an insect deterrent that also happens to jam 2 of the systems your gut uses to expel foreign molecules. Which sounds sinister until you realize it is why pepper makes other compounds in this series measurably easier to absorb. The arms race, it turns out, wrote our formulation strategy before we did.
And the rest of the pantry? Every botanical on our shelf answers to the same logic, even the ones not getting a full dossier just yet. Lemon balm pours up to 8% of its leaf’s dry weight into rosmarinic acid, the same phenolic shield its cousin rosemary carries, then wraps itself in lemony terpenes that repel some insects and, in one of chemistry’s better ironies, speak the honeybee’s own language: the swarm-calming herb of ancient beekeepers is named Melissa, Greek for the bee itself. Moringa, as we saw, walks around with the mustard oil bomb. Chlorella armors its single cell in one of the toughest walls in the green kingdom, built on a chitin-like polymer, which is exactly why we crack it before your digestion gets its turn. Bladderwrack fights its tide-line war back in Sieges and Sunburn. Reishi is not a plant at all; it fights the same war in a different kingdom, stacking bitter triterpenes in the outermost layers of its fruiting body, right where a hungry visitor would take the first bite. And Lactobacillus rhamnosus reminds us the war never truly ends, even inside you: a probiotic is a mercenary we hire for the gut’s own turf conflicts, armed with acid, sticky pili for claiming territory, and proteins that sabotage rival biofilms.
The rest, creatine, zinc, chromium, and vitamin B6, really are supplies rather than munitions, and we like them that way. An army needs a quartermaster more than it needs another sword.
Four hundred million years of battle-tested R&D, and the lab notes are written in molecules. Let’s read them together.
Reducose®
Reducose® is a patented natural extract from the leaves of the white mulberry and a registered trademark of Phynova. Originally grown in China, where it is used for patients with diabetes, white mulberry is a powerful supressant of glucose formation.
Berberine
Berberine is a natural bioactive compound that's been used for centuries in traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine to treat various health issues. It comes from the fruits of the barberry plant (Barberis aristata) in the barberry family, which are widely used for digestive and metabolic problems.
Turmeric
Turmeric is most often seen as a simple spice, dye, or seasoning. Hiding within its vivid color is a range of bioactive compounds that could revolutionize your recovery and regeneration.
Related products
Junai GLP-1 Slim
- Slim helps regulate blood sugar levels with chromium, which helps stabilize energy reserves.
- Berberine helps in maintaining healthy cholesterol levels and blood glucose regulation.
- White mulberry contributes to carbohydrate metabolism and glycemic response.
- Zinc contributes to the normal absorption and metabolism of macronutrients.
Organic Ashwagandha Serene State
- 100% organic ashwagandha root powder.
- It contributes to relaxation and supports mental and physical well-being.
- Useful during periods of mental and nervous strain and for maintaining balance.
- An adaptogenic plant, traditionally used in Ayurveda.
Organic Turmeric Golden Revival
- 100% organic turmeric without additives, in its pure natural form.
- Frequently included in post-physical activity regeneration routines.
- Dietary supplement for the support of stressed joints and muscles.
- Used as part of nutritional approaches that support the body under oxidative stress and strain.
- Used as part of dietary approaches that support the body under oxidative stress and strain.
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