Fohow Elixir 3 Treasures: the little strongman from the ritual table

Fohow Elixir 3 Treasures is made at the Fohow pharmaceutical plant in Tianjin and sold in Russia by WHIEDA. Inside is the same base as the Phoenix Elixir, plus black spiny ant extract. The ant is tiny, but its safety margin is worthy of an engineer. In 2014 American scientists tested an ant’s neck to breaking point, and it held up to five thousand times the body weight. The experiment used a different, forest species. Ours lives in China, where ants have been invited to the table for more than two thousand years. Half a vial at breakfast — and your energy lasts until evening: for work, for home and for yourself.

The little strongman: what an ant can do

Ohio State University engineers took the ant apart like a mechanism they wanted to copy. The insects were put to sleep with cold, glued face-down into a special centrifuge and spun up to hundreds of revolutions per second. The neck is the only joint through which the entire load from the jaws passes to the six legs. That is what they tested to breaking point (J Biomech, 2014). The safety margin surprised the authors themselves: beforehand they had bet on about a thousand times the body weight (Ohio State University). Now they are thinking about how to give robots joints like these.

There are almost 20 quadrillion such strongmen on Earth. Biologists at the University of Hong Kong arrived at that figure in 2022 by pooling 489 studies from every continent. Together, ants weigh more than all the planet’s wild birds and mammals combined — roughly a fifth of the weight of humanity (PNAS, 2022).

A little bug with righteousness inside

Look at the character for “ant”: 蟻. On the left is the sign for “insect,” on the right 義 — “duty, righteousness.” The explanation was left by Li Shizhen in 1578, in his great herbal, the Bencao Gangmu. Ants, he writes, have the duty of ruler and subject — hence the character. They live by rank, march in formation and sense rain in advance (text of the herbal).

That same entry in the herbal holds the whole history of the ant in China. It has been both a delicacy for the nobility and a guardian of gardens.

What’s in your hands: the Phoenix base and the ant

How did an ant end up in a vial next to mushrooms? Through a recipe the plant already had. “3 Treasures” is the younger sister of the Phoenix Elixir. They share a base: a culture of Tibetan cordyceps, lingzhi and shiitake on honey. We told the story of this cordyceps, which in 2012 cost twice as much as gold, in our article about the Phoenix Elixir. Here, the ant was added to it.

Ingredients according to the official catalogue — five components in water: cordyceps, shiitake and black spiny ant as extracts, lingzhi spores and honey (elixir product card).

The black spiny ant: who is it?

Scientists call it Polyrhachis dives; in Chinese it is 拟黑多刺蚁. It really is spiny: worker ants have spines on their backs. It lives from southern China and Japan to Australia and builds its nests right in the trees, stitching leaves together with the silk of its larvae. In Okinawa it is known for its strong and painful bite (Wikipedia). In China the main harvesting regions are Guizhou, Yunnan and Guangxi.

Animals value it too. The black spiny ant is the main prey of the Chinese pangolin, a scaly anteater on the brink of extinction. Zoologists from Guangzhou analysed the composition of a whole nest so that captive pangolins could be fed as they are in the wild (Zoo Biology, 2022).

Seven, fourteen, forty-nine

The great book of Chinese medicine, the Huangdi Neijing, counts a woman’s life in seven-year cycles. At seven, a girl’s kidney qi grows strong. At fourteen, her periods begin. At twenty-eight, the body is in full bloom. At forty-two, the sixth seven, the face loses its freshness and the first grey hairs appear. At forty-nine, tiangui — the “heavenly water” of female strength — runs dry. For men the count goes in eight-year cycles (Neijing text).

If you are forty-five, you are right between the sixth and seventh sevens. And in the same chapter the book leaves room for hope. The Yellow Emperor asks why some people keep their strength even in later years. The physician Qi Bo answers: their qi flows freely through the channels, and their kidney qi is abundant.

In this picture, the kidneys are a storehouse. They receive the essence of all the organs and keep it, says the Neijing. This is jing, the first of the three treasures. Parents give it at birth, and the whole of life spends it: worries, illnesses, overload. It is replenished with food and practices (Wikipedia). Chinese reference books say of the ant exactly that: 补肾, “nourishes the kidneys” (review in China Pharmacy). In folk tradition it is a remedy for elders: it is said to lengthen one’s years and add qi, and to give men strength. Ant extract is usually taken mixed with wine (Wikipedia).

What the lab found

The ant is also studied in laboratories in Tianjin, the very city where the Fohow plant stands.

Who will find “3 Treasures” especially welcome

The elixir is made for grown-up life, with work, home and all your loved ones at once:

How to take Fohow Elixir 3 Treasures

One minute at breakfast — and that’s it. No brewing, no measuring spoons, no counting drops. The regimen follows the state registration certificate:

Patent, award and documents

Three names on one box: the Fohow plant in Tianjin makes the elixir, FOHERB is its group and brand, and WHIEDA sells the elixir in Russia and the CIS.

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