Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Maca powder = maca flour. I have cooked with maca flour more than a decade, as a baking and cooking flour. In Peru, maca flour, or "harina de maca" is a relatively cheap regional culinary flour. Healthworks is a great specimen of this culinary flour; ideal for cooking, good flavor, bitterness subsiding when cooked. Firstly, maca (Lepidium meyenii) itself is a human selected, human tended and human cultivated crop in the Andean highlands -- selling the product as "wild" and "wildcrafted" is deliberately misleading. However, the main reason I give this ONE star is simple - this company (among several others) gives little indication as to the identity of the product. The prevailing trend supported in the industry suggests that people just eat this flour raw. Like other starchy root crops, maca is particularly difficult to digest when raw. It contains difficult soluble fibers, just like beans and sunchokes do, and it also contains goitrogens (glucoseinolates) - that's why the raw root and it's flour can be bitter, and cause gastric upset. It's no wonder people have digestive and occasional hormonal/thyroid complaints with it. Please read the other negative reviews, see what has been happening to many people... Cooking maca serves an important biochemical purpose -- soluble fibers are lessened greatly by heat, and it's goitrogens are rendered inactive. Other members of the genus Lepidium have these phytochemicals, too - such as common Peppergrass (Lepidium virginicum) a presence which is marked by the sharply pungent, spicy, aromatic quality of the leaves and roots, a quality fresh maca also possesses. Among the people who grow it, maca is not considered healthy unless cooked. It is a paradox that the "raw food" crowd has gotten a hold of this vegetable flour that has always been, and by all accounts always should be cooked. For casual non-cooking purposes I use the gelatinized maca (black root is the strongest type, in my opinion). "Gelatinized" means that it's starches and soluble fibers have been broken down, it's goitrogens denatured, and more of the feel-good alkaloids are freed. Contrary to many claims, gelatinized maca is not concentrated over the powder / flour, it is merely heated in water to starch gelatinization temperature (~160f) and then dried. The gelatinization process is used specifically to address the digestion/goitrogen issue inherent with the root - it's the same process used to process corn starch and potato flour, and several companies make/sell it. Digestibility is the process' entire purpose, that's why it is even used for maca. Back into antiquity, maca had to be cooked in order to be gentle on digestion, on metabolism, and it has always been cooked traditionally for this purpose. If you want to use maca for therapeutic purposes, use a gelatinized product, or cook with the flour if you can find it inexpensively - use the less irritating raw juice powders if you are looking for a potent "raw" product. I prefer the black root gelatinized maca, but the other colors have their charm, too. White macas are sweeter and more mellow, and red maca has a slightly different flavor, too. If you do buy this maca flour product, do so with the intent of cooking with it as is done in Peru. There are many people these days telling you to eat it raw, to glean the mood, stamina, and sexual benefits which Andean people have known for a long time. Yet these mercantile voices never mention how the plant has always been prepared - cooked - one of one most crucial aspects of it's identity. Why argue from antiquity about the health benefits, while ignoring the food's ethnobotany? It's a mix of mistaken understanding, and also because there's a good profit in this marked-up culinary flour. To read about maca flour's history, uses and identity, I can recommend a great book published in 2000 by Ethnobotanist Chris Kilham:Tales from the Medicine Trail: Tracking Down the Health Secrets of Shamans, Herbalists, Mystics, Yogis, and Other Healers -- it contains an entire section on maca, and was published before merchants and raw diet gurus altered the plant's native identity.