"Taheebo" is the South American name for a tree. It grows in Brazil, Argentina and many other countries. The bark of this tree has been used for centuries by the natives of each of these countries -- used to treat all sorts of serious health problems, but particularly to treat cancer.

The treatment generally has been to take the bark of the tree and either soak it or boil it in water to make a tea. When this material was first introduced into the United States, it came on the rush of publicity in South America about a particular girl who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and on whom the doctors gave up. You can read more of the story on this web site. Click here: http://www.oralchelation.com/taheebo/witch.htm

The girl was drinking more than 30 cups of this tea each day, but before long her cancer was gone. When the product got popular in the US it was originally in the form of "loose bark" in bags, sold in health food stores. People would buy the bark, make tea and drink it.

You can still do that.

The tea would be more effective if the bark is "soaked" rather than boiled. Soaking takes longer, but preserves some of the natural elements which would be damaged by heat.

As this product became more and more popular, it became more and more obvious that the dosage needed to handle cancer was large and that even 30 cups of the tea didn't always work. So, various companies started making an "extract" form of the bark.

Generally these extracts were made by soaking the bark in alcohol and water for some days, draining off the liquid, putting the liquid into bottles and selling them. This is generally an effective technique, but leaves the customer with an alcohol "tincture" of this herb.

Vibrant Life has arranged a more advanced form of extract. We have the bark soaked in a combination of alcohol and glycerin. Both of these are good solvents for getting the active ingredients out of the bark. Then the mass of bark residue is strained out -- leaving a liquid concentrate in the form of water, alcohol and glycerin.

Then, this liquid mixture is run through a low temperature vacuum chamber to drive off as much of the liquid as possible. This leaves an oily mass which is highly concentrated as to the active ingredients in the bark, but it is a mass which cannot be "poured" into capsules. It is too "sticky."

So, this oily mass is then mixed with dry, ground Taheebo bark to make the mixture sufficiently dry so that it will move through the capsule-making machines.

This material still contains a high degree of concentration of the active ingredients -- so that one capsule has about the same active ingredients as would six cups of tea.

As you can see the process is extensive and not cheap!

But, there are fraudulent vitamin companies out there which completely eliminate the extraction process. They simply grind up the bark of the tree and pour that loose powdered bark into capsules.

They can legally claim that they have "Taheebo Capsules" but the contents of those capsules are nothing more than ground-up bark.

It is a fraud!

The bark, like all wood products, is largely cellulose and the body cannot digest or use cellulose other than as a fiber. It does NOT get through the intestine into the body.

So, there are lots of people who think they are getting a valuable Taheebo product who are just swallowing sawdust!

I'll be naming names on my websites as I find them.

The Vibrant Life product also has the sawdust in the capsule, but it is used ONLY as a filler to allow the extracted concentrate to be "pourable."

You could use those sawdust capsules by opening them up and mixing the contents with water to make tea, but the tiny quantity of bark in one capsule won't come close to making even one cup of tea.

So, many of the Taheebo capsules you'll find in health food stores are frauds.

Can you tell by looking at the label?

Well, even though it's not illegal to put the bark dust in a capsule and call it "Taheebo Capsules," it would be illegal to make a claim that this stuff is an extract. It just isn't. So, from my experience these products do NOT claim to be extracts -- they only make you think that you are getting an extract with some slippery words.

If you find one of these, send me the label and I'll write the manufacturer a letter telling them they are selling a fraudulent product. If they don't withdraw the stuff from the market, or label it honestly, I'll publish their names!