Rose and calafate: two Patagonian infusions and what is actually known about them

In Magallanes two entirely unrelated plants are made into infusions. Calafate is a native shrub that was here before any sheep station. The rose arrived by ship, someone planted it beside a house, and today it grows on its own in the field. Both end up in the same cup, and about both there circulates more enthusiasm than data.

The rose that outlived the gardener

It grows as a dense thicket near old houses, on the coast, exposed to wind and salt. Nobody who planted it is still there: it spread on its own from a garden that no longer exists. Petals and hips are harvested from it for jam and infusion.

The venue that harvests it identifies it as Rosa centifolia, the Provence rose. We publish that identification as what it is: their statement, not a botanical determination verified by this publication.

That distinction is not a technicality. A wild Patagonian rose would be one thing; a European garden rose that colonised the southern countryside is another, and frankly a better story: a domestic object brought by settlers that stopped being domestic.

Calafate and its number

Calafate (Berberis microphylla) has a high measured antioxidant capacity. The figure circulating in the literature is 25,662 µmol Trolox equivalents per 100 grams of fresh weight, attributed to Speisky et al. in 2012 and reported by a paper published in Molecules in 2019.

That same paper identified sixteen anthocyanins in the extract and quantified the three main ones: delphinidin-3-glucoside, 4.04 mg per gram of extract; petunidin-3-glucoside, 3.81; and malvidin-3-glucoside, 2.24. Total anthocyanins are double the flavonols.

The local figure in circulation, and why it cannot be compared

In February 2017, El Pingüino reported that Magallanes calafate has 70,000 ORAC units, almost triple the scientific figure. The statement is from Daniel Flores, manager of Alimag, a company that buys and trades calafate, and the report does not state the basis of the value.

That does not mean the figure is false. ORAC values change depending on whether they are measured on fresh or dry weight, and the difference between the two bases can be several-fold. It means the two figures are not comparable while one of them does not state what it is calculated on. We publish both with their origin and leave the gap visible.

So what benefits does it have?

ORAC measures how much antioxidant activity an extract shows in a test tube. It does not measure what happens to a person who drinks an infusion. The Molecules paper we cite used rats, isolated endothelial cells and concentrated extracts: not fresh fruit in people.