List of Chinese herbs considered as dietary supplements

There are 2,711 Chinese Medicine herbs listed in the official Pharmacopoeia of China, compiled by the Pharmacopoeia Commission of the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China.

These herbs are further classified into 3 categories:

1. Herbs classified as food. These are the safest. Please see list here.
2. Herbs classified as dietary supplements (this list).
3. Herbs classified as medicine, which you cannot get without a doctor's prescription.

The list below are the herbs that were classified as dietary supplements in the latest 2020 edition of the pharmacopoeia. In China this means that whoever commercializes those herbs need to follow a long list of regulatory obligations and precautions beforehand. As such, those herbs are considered more potent and less safe than those classified as food. That being said they're still considered relatively safe, otherwise they'd be classified as medicine.

Please note that a few herbs are on both the food and the dietary supplements list. This isn't an error, that's the way those herbs are classified in China. This is because some of the herbs are classified as food under certain limitations (like the quantity a food producer can use in their recipe) while those limitations are removed if the herb is used as a dietary supplement.

This list can be extremely useful to anyone living in Western countries because many of these ingredients have been little studied in these countries. At the end of the day, China remains the best source of information for Chinese herbs because it is were all these ingredients have been studied in depth and used for centuries.

Without further due, please find the list below.