Anacardiaceae
Pistacia lentiscus
Mastic · Lentisk
- Part used
- resin
- Native range
- The Mediterranean; the resin is produced commercially only on the Greek island of Chios
- Morphology
- An evergreen shrub or small tree to four metres with leathery pinnate leaves. Cuts in the bark of the Chios variety exude a resin that hardens into translucent pale tears — the original chewing gum.
What is in it
Evidence
Small trials support mastic for functional dyspepsia and report activity against Helicobacter pylori, though it does not eradicate the organism as antibiotic regimens do. The evidence is limited but unusually specific for a traditional resin.
Safety
Well tolerated. Allergy occurs, and cross-reactivity within the Anacardiaceae — the family also containing cashew, mango and poison ivy — is worth noting.
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient. Chios mastic has protected designation of origin status in the EU.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Produced on Chios for at least two and a half thousand years, and the source of the word masticate. Used across the Mediterranean and the Ottoman world for digestive complaints and oral hygiene, and traded as a luxury.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Mastic is produced commercially in one place on earth: the mastichochoria, twenty-four villages in southern Chios, where the particular variety of Pistacia lentiscus that yields usable resin grows. It has been that way for two and a half millennia, the villages were built fortified to protect the crop, and the practice is on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list.
The Ottoman administration controlled the trade so tightly that stealing mastic was punishable by death.
Its evidence is a small, tidy example of a traditional stomach remedy pointing at something real — activity against Helicobacter pylori, the organism behind most peptic ulcers, which nobody knew existed until 1982 and which two Australians won a Nobel Prize for identifying.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.