(Worthy Insights) – One of the most prized ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine, cattle gallstones have become so valuable that traders are willing to pay as much as $5,800 an ounce—twice the price of gold—for the nuggets of hardened bile.
Herbalists use them to treat strokes as they grapple with a surge in hypertension, obesity and other conditions familiar in the affluent West. Such maladies are now widespread in China after a half-century of rapid development and the changing diets that have come with it. Surging demand for gallstones has sparked a global treasure hunt across the world’s top beef-producing regions, places as far apart as Texas and Australia, and especially here on the savannah of Brazil, the world’s largest cattle exporter.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” said Rafael Faria, a police investigator in Barretos, a farming town in São Paulo state that is the birthplace of Brazilian rodeo. He was recently called upon to probe a spate of gallstone heists and rampant smuggling as traders try to get them to buyers in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. [ Source (Read More…) ]