MONGOLIA

After menopause the dryness turns up everywhere, from your eyes to your skin to places no one warned you about.
Mongolia has long reached for a tart orange berry for exactly this.

Sea buckthorn  ·  Hippophae rhamnoides  ·  Mechanism: omega-7 (mucous membranes)

Sea buckthorn is a thorny shrub that survives brutal cold and thin soil, studding the steppe and river valleys of Mongolia with dense clusters of tart, bright orange berries that cling to the branch through the frost. It has been used for centuries across Mongolia, Tibet, and the Himalaya, turning up in food, in folk medicine, and in the classical texts of Tibetan medicine.

Its botanical name, Hippophae, comes from Greek words for shining horse, after an old belief that the leaves and berries put a gloss on a horse's coat. Mongol lore ties it to the cavalry of Genghis Khan, said to have fed it to their horses and to themselves on long campaigns.

The berry is intensely sour and unusually rich in oil, and both the soft orange pulp and the small hard seeds are pressed separately to extract it. In the region it is taken for the skin, for wounds and healing, and for the dryness that comes with cold, wind, and age alike.

Its oldest uses circle a single theme, tissue that has dried out or worn thin, whether from weather, injury, or time. That steady focus on dryness is the thread that modern trials would eventually pick up in earnest.

The oil is unusual in the fat it carries, especially omega-7, or palmitoleic acid, which is a normal building block of skin and mucous membranes. The idea, and the chemistry behind it, is that supplying more of it may help the body maintain the moist, intact linings that tend to thin and dry as estrogen falls with age, the tissues that feel it first.

Two small human trials give the idea some real footing. In postmenopausal women with vaginal dryness, three grams of sea buckthorn oil a day for three months improved the integrity of the vaginal lining and eased symptoms, and a separate trial in people with dry eye found it steadied the tear film and lessened burning and redness.

The West rubs sea buckthorn on the skin. The dryness trials had you swallow it.

The honest scale of this is modest, so keep expectations in check. The trials are small and several trace to the same producer-linked research group, the effects are real but gentle, and for menopausal dryness the standard options like vaginal estrogen work better, which makes sea buckthorn a reasonable choice mainly when those are unwanted or off the table entirely.

The how-to

If you try it, the studied form is the oil taken by mouth, not a juice or a face serum.

Look for the oral oil in capsules or as an oil, ideally one that combines both pulp and seed, sold as omega-7 supplements at pharmacies and online for roughly twenty to thirty dollars a bottle. The tart juice and the cosmetic face oils are pleasant, but they are not what the dryness trials used.
The trials used about two to three grams of the oil a day, taken with food, for around three months before judging, so treat it as a slow, steady thing rather than a quick fix. Give it the full stretch, since any effect builds gradually.
Expect a modest benefit at most, a little less grit in the eyes or less dryness over weeks, rather than a dramatic change. It pairs fine with eye drops or a moisturizer while you see whether it helps.
Sea buckthorn is a food and generally well tolerated, though it can cause mild stomach upset at first. For vaginal or vulvar dryness after menopause, talk with your doctor, since vaginal estrogen and other prescribed treatments are more effective, and any persistent dryness, pain, or bleeding deserves evaluation rather than self-treatment. If you take a blood thinner, mention it, since sea buckthorn may have a mild effect on platelets.

Tomorrow: South Africa and rooibos
the caffeine-free red bush tea, and the modest but real things the studies actually found.

See you then.