GREECE

The dull ache and fullness in your upper stomach after eating has a name.
On one Greek island, the old remedy is a tree's hardened tears.

Mastic (mastiha)  ·  Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia  ·  Mechanism: gut anti-inflammatory

Mastic is the resin of a scrubby evergreen, Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia, that yields its prized form in only one place on earth, the southern half of the Greek island of Chios. Growers score the bark by hand in summer so the sap weeps out, hardens into translucent tears on the ground, and is gathered, cleaned, and sorted over the following weeks.

The trade is old and highly specific, run for generations by a cluster of villages in the island's dry south whose whole economy grew up around the resin. It was chewed as an early form of chewing gum, distilled into a clear liqueur, and taken for the stomach long before anyone could describe its chemistry.

That last use, mastic for the stomach, is the through line worth following out of the folklore. Greek households and later the Ottoman court reached for it against stomach pain and indigestion as an ordinary matter of course, not a last resort but a household staple.

For most of that long history no one could say why it helped, only that it did. The resin was simply the thing you reached for when your stomach turned, one generation quietly handing the habit to the next.

Mastic is a dense mix of plant compounds, chiefly triterpenic acids found in the resin, that carry both antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activity. In the laboratory these compounds quiet inflammatory signaling in the gut lining and act directly against Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium behind many ulcers and a good deal of chronic indigestion.

The human evidence is narrower but real. In a placebo-controlled trial of people with functional dyspepsia, the recurring upper-gut pain and fullness with no ulcer to explain it, three weeks of pure mastic eased symptoms in far more patients than placebo did, with clear improvement in roughly three-quarters of those on mastic against about four in ten on placebo, and Europe's medicines regulator now lists mastic as a traditional remedy for mild digestive complaints.

The world kept mastic as a flavor and lost the thing that was studied.

The catch is that those trials used pure resin at a real daily dose, taken as small hardened pieces, not a whiff of it in dessert. Most of what carries the name abroad is mastiha liqueur, mastic ice cream, or breath gum, which borrow the pine-bright taste and almost none of the resin the studies actually put to the test.

The how-to

This is a resin you take in small pieces, not a spice you cook with.

Buy pure Chios mastic tears, the small pale crystals sold by Greek and Middle Eastern grocers and online, often ten to twenty dollars for a jar that lasts a long time. Look for the Chios name and whole tears rather than anything labeled mastic-flavored.
The dyspepsia trial used about 350 milligrams three times a day, which is a few small tears each time, chewed slowly or swallowed with water, for around three weeks before judging. You can also simply chew a piece like gum, which is the oldest way it was ever taken.
Give it the full few weeks, since that is the window the trial measured, and expect a resinous, pine-like taste that softens as you chew. It is a gentle addition, not a fast-acting antacid.
If you have a pistachio or tree-nut allergy, be cautious, since mastic comes from a related plant. And treat ongoing or worsening stomach pain, especially with weight loss, trouble swallowing, black stools, or vomiting, as a reason to see a doctor rather than to keep self-treating, since those can signal something a resin will not fix.

Tomorrow: India and ashwagandha
the root Ayurveda used for stress, and what the sleep and cortisol trials actually show.

See you then.