Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
It isn’t exactly alchemy, but gallstones can be turned into gold. We are talking about cattle gallstones that are worth roughly twice as much as their equivalent weight in gold. The market for these stones is China where gallstones from various animals have been a feature of Traditional Chinese Medicine for two thousand years. Of course, a long history of use does not mean a long history of effective use.
Bile, or gall, is a fluid produced in the liver and stored in the gallbladder from where it is dispensed into the small intestine when food enters. It is a complex composition of bile acids that have a common steroidal structure, cholesterol and its derivatives, amino acids, peptides and bilirubin and biliverdin, pigments formed when red blood cells break down. The main role of bile is to disperse ingested fat into tiny particles called micelles that have a large surface area that allows for increased contact with pancreatic lipase, the enzyme that breaks fats, chemically “triglycerides,” down into fatty acids that can then be absorbed into the bloodstream.
Sometimes bile can build up in the gallbladder and crystallize into stones. This can happen in humans, often necessitating surgical removal when they block the bile duct. In cattle they are not detected until slaughter. Cattle stones are not common, found in roughly one in a hundred animals. Their rarity coupled with the demand in China makes the stones so valuable that abattoir workers were collecting them and selling them to middlemen who in turn would sell them to China. Recently, slaughterhouses in Brazil, Uruguay and Australia have realized the value of the stones and now market them themselves. They have even set up video cameras to prevent workers from absconding with the treasure.
The Chinese government promotes traditional medicine as a source of national pride and also for use by an aging Chinese population with inadequate access to modern medicine. Scientists have even developed a method to surgically implant a hardened mass of mushrooms around which gallstones form as well as a technique to add chemicals to liquid bile to produce a stone.
Various preparations made from gallstones are sold with claims of treating numerous diseases including strokes. That latter actually has some evidence, but it comes from mice. A surprisingly large number of studies have found some health benefit using gallstones in one form or another but they are all in the Chinese literature and mostly originate from institutions devoted to the promotion of traditional medicine so their reliability is questionable. Given that cattle gallstones are worth a fortune, I wondered if there is anyone out there producing counterfeit stones. It seems there may be! I wonder if they would work just as well as the real thing. Just a thought.
It isn’t exactly alchemy, but gallstones can be turned into gold. We are talking about cattle gallstones that are worth roughly twice as much as their equivalent weight in gold. The market for these stones is China where gallstones from various animals have been a feature of Traditional Chinese Medicine for two thousand years. Of course, a long history of use does not mean a long history of effective use.
Bile, or gall, is a fluid produced in the liver and stored in the gallbladder from where it is dispensed into the small intestine when food enters. It is a complex composition of bile acids that have a common steroidal structure, cholesterol and its derivatives, amino acids, peptides and bilirubin and biliverdin, pigments formed when red blood cells break down. The main role of bile is to disperse ingested fat into tiny particles called micelles that have a large surface area that allows for increased contact with pancreatic lipase, the enzyme that breaks fats, chemically “triglycerides,” down into fatty acids that can then be absorbed into the bloodstream.
Sometimes bile can build up in the gallbladder and crystallize into stones. This can happen in humans, often necessitating surgical removal when they block the bile duct. In cattle they are not detected until slaughter. Cattle stones are not common, found in roughly one in a hundred animals. Their rarity coupled with the demand in China makes the stones so valuable that abattoir workers were collecting them and selling them to middlemen who in turn would sell them to China. Recently, slaughterhouses in Brazil, Uruguay and Australia have realized the value of the stones and now market them themselves. They have even set up video cameras to prevent workers from absconding with the treasure.
The Chinese government promotes traditional medicine as a source of national pride and also for use by an aging Chinese population with inadequate access to modern medicine. Scientists have even developed a method to surgically implant a hardened mass of mushrooms around which gallstones form as well as a technique to add chemicals to liquid bile to produce a stone.
Various preparations made from gallstones are sold with claims of treating numerous diseases including strokes. That latter actually has some evidence, but it comes from mice. A surprisingly large number of studies have found some health benefit using gallstones in one form or another but they are all in the Chinese literature and mostly originate from institutions devoted to the promotion of traditional medicine so their reliability is questionable. Given that cattle gallstones are worth a fortune, I wondered if there is anyone out there producing counterfeit stones. It seems there may be! I wonder if they would work just as well as the real thing. Just a thought.
