African Mango — a forest seed from Cameroon, eaten for a thousand years, milled into a capsule

African mango is the seed of the dika tree (Irvingia gabonensis) of West and Central Africa. This pot holds 60 vegan capsules of one ingredient: the seed extract.

A clean cream pot, the green band of our label, sixty vegan capsules inside. The dose is gentle and old-fashioned — one or two capsules a day, with water, thirty minutes before food. That's it. No proprietary stack. No nine-ingredient blend. Just the seed.

A bottle of sixty lasts a month at two a day, two months at one. The kind of thing you take for a season and see how you feel.

In a stretch of rainforest from Sierra Leone east to the Congo basin grows a tree called Irvingia gabonensis. The English name is the bush mango, or sometimes the wild mango. In Cameroon and Nigeria — where it is most loved — the local names are dika (Bassa, Douala), ogbono (Igbo), odika (Ewondo, Bulu), bobo (Hausa-influenced trade language).

The fruit looks remarkably like a small green mango — fibrous yellow flesh around a single hard kernel. Most travellers eat the flesh and throw away the seed. The local kitchen does the opposite. It is the seed that has carried the tree's reputation for a thousand years.

The kernels are extracted from the fallen fruit, washed, dried in the sun, then either kept whole or pounded into a paste. The paste — ogbono in southern Nigeria, odika in Cameroon — is the foundation of one of West Africa's most famous home stews. A small handful of pounded kernel goes into a pot of water with leaves, onions, peppers, and meat or fish. As it cooks, the dika seed releases a unique mucilaginous quality that thickens the broth into something silky, faintly bitter, deeply savoury. Ogbono soup is to a Nigerian Sunday lunch what gravy is to a British roast — universal, beloved, and grandmother-built.

That is the food story. It is one of those plants whose food role and herbal role are essentially the same role, eaten daily, for as long as anyone can remember.

Take one or two capsules a day, thirty minutes before food. It also contains a high proportion of fats, mostly lauric and myristic, the same family found in coconut. None of that is alchemy. It is simply what's inside the seed when you grind it.

We use a concentrated extract of the seed — equivalent to 18,000mg of the original whole seed — in every capsule. One capsule, once or twice a day, before food, in the same spirit a Cameroonian grandmother would add a spoonful of odika paste to her stew.

The supplement industry's habit is to stack. Twelve botanicals. The label looks impressive. Here we chose a single ingredient.

We chose to do the opposite here. African mango has a long enough food and folk record on its own. It earns its place in any cupboard that takes traditional plants seriously. So we built a single-plant capsule, at a meaningful dose, instead of burying it inside a nine-ingredient blend where it would be a footnote.

If you want a stack, we have stacks. This isn't one. This is the seed, plainly.

Take one or two capsules a day with water, thirty minutes before food. Most people start with one a day for the first two weeks and then move to two if they want to.

Take it with a full glass of water, not a sip.

Don't expect the kind of effect you get from a coffee or a chilli.

If after sixty days nothing has shifted in how you feel, stop. A supplement that isn't doing anything for you isn't worth your money. We'd rather have your trust for the next thing than your guilt over the wrong thing.

This is a food supplement — it complements a varied diet, doesn't replace one. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication, or living with a medical condition, talk to your GP or pharmacist first. Keep it cool, dry, sealed, out of reach of children. Don't exceed two capsules a day.

The dika tree doesn't grow in the UK. We source from established harvest chains in West and Central Africa, where the kernels are still gathered from the same forests they have always been gathered from.

If you've read this far, thank you. We tried to write the kind of page we'd want to read before spending money — no neon promises, no overblown language. Just one tree, one seed, and a small daily ritual that has fed and quietly supported a slice of Africa for centuries.

— Vitadefence