Frankincense is a wound, not a harvest

Boswellia is a deciduous tree of the dry hill forests of central and northern India, cousin to the species that give the frankincense of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. It grows on poor, rocky ground where little else takes hold, and it isn't so much harvested as tapped: someone cuts the bark, and the tree weeps a pale resin that hardens in the air into translucent tears, picked off by hand.

That resin isn't one substance. Roughly a third of it is a fragrant oil, some is a gum that dissolves in water, and the rest is the resin fraction carrying the boswellic acids. Several of those have been identified, differing from one another only in small details, and one of them — usually shortened to AKBA — gets singled out on labels far more often than the rest.

None of the proportions are fixed. What's in the resin shifts with where the tree grows, the season it was tapped, how old it is, and how long the resin sat before anyone collected it. Two batches of untreated boswellia resin can differ a great deal, and that is the practical reason extracts get standardised at all.

A standardisation figure tells you what the finished extract has been adjusted to contain — 65% total boswellic acids, say. It's worth noticing that a total figure and an AKBA figure are two different promises: AKBA is one member of the group, and it's usually present at a much lower percentage than the total. An extract can honestly declare a high total while telling you nothing about the spread within it.

Bionetic's Boswellia Serrata is a resin extract at 65% boswellic acids, 1000 mg in a two-capsule serving. Food supplements should not be used as a substitute for a varied and balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle.