Keeda Jadi (Yarsagumba): The Complete Guide

Keeda Jadi is the Indian name for Ophiocordyceps sinensis. You will also see it written keedajadi, keera jadi, kira jari or kheeda jadi. In Nepal it is yarsagumba. In Tibetan it is yartsa gunbu, which means summer grass, winter worm. In Hindi, कीड़ा जड़ी. In English, the caterpillar fungus.

Every one of those names describes the same object. A ghost moth caterpillar, hollowed out and preserved by a fungus, with a single dark stalk growing out of its head.

This page is what we know, and where the knowing stops. It contains no health claims, because none can be substantiated. What it does contain is everything else: the biology, the provenance, the season, the compounds, the honest comparison against the cultivated species, and the reason a kilogram of it can cost more than a kilogram of gold.

What Is Keeda Jadi?

Ophiocordyceps sinensis is a fungus that parasitises the larva of a ghost moth. It is not cultivated. Every strand sold anywhere in the world was found by a human being on their hands and knees in an alpine meadow.

Note the genus. It is Ophiocordyceps, not Cordyceps. The species was reclassified out of Cordyceps in 2007 on genetic grounds. Sellers still call it Cordyceps sinensis, and so does most of the internet, which is why we use both names on this page.

Its Many Names, and Why They Matter

Provenance is written into the naming. Each name tells you where the speaker is standing.

• Keeda Jadi (कीड़ा जड़ी). India. Literally insect-herb.
• Yarsagumba (यार्सागुम्बा). Nepal. From the Tibetan.
• Yartsa gunbu. Tibet. Summer grass, winter worm.
• Dong chong xia cao. China. The same phrase, in Mandarin.
• Caterpillar fungus. English, and the only name that describes what it actually is.

If you are searching for this in India, you are most likely typing keeda jadi or keedajadi. Both return the same thing. So do the spellings keera jadi, kira jadi and kheeda jadi. Nobody is misspelling anything. Devanagari does not map cleanly onto the Roman alphabet, and no single transliteration is correct.

A single strand, lifted with the soil intact

The Caterpillar Fungus: What Actually Happens

The lifecycle begins underground and takes the better part of a year.

Spores of Ophiocordyceps sinensis reach the larva of a ghost moth as it feeds on roots beneath the alpine turf. The fungus colonises the larva slowly, replacing its tissue with mycelium while leaving the outer cuticle intact. By late winter the caterpillar is a hollow shell, saffron-orange, and perfectly preserved in shape. Its segments are still visible. So are its legs.

Then, as the snow retreats, a single dark grey-brown stroma pushes out of the head end of the caterpillar and breaks the surface of the soil. That thin wiry stalk, a few millimetres across, is the only part a collector can see. Everything else is still buried.

This is why the harvest window is measured in weeks. Before the snow goes, nothing is visible. Once the grass grows, the stroma disappears into it.

Where It Grows: Uttarakhand, Nepal, Tibet

Wild Keeda Jadi grows in the alpine meadows above the treeline, across the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayan arc. In India, that means Uttarakhand, principally the Pithoragarh and Chamoli districts. It is also found in Sikkim, in Nepal, and in Bhutan.

It grows nowhere else. Despite decades of attempts, Ophiocordyceps sinensis has never been farmed at commercial scale. That single fact governs everything about its price, its scarcity, and its conservation status.

How Keeda Jadi Is Collected

In Uttarakhand the season opens roughly in May and closes in June. Collectors from the Bhotiya and Garhwali communities move up to the meadows and search on hands and knees, looking for a stalk a few millimetres wide against brown grass. A good day might yield a handful.

The whole fungus is lifted with the soil intact, then cleaned by hand. Nothing is powdered. Nothing is extracted. What you buy is the object itself.

Our Keeda Jadi is bought directly from collector cooperatives and graded by size and condition into Collector, Select and Classic tiers.

What Is Inside It

These are the compound classes identified in Ophiocordyceps sinensis. They describe what is in the fungus, not what it does in a person.

• Nucleosides, including adenosine and cordycepin.
• Polysaccharides, long-chain sugars found in fungal cell walls.
• D-mannitol (sometimes called cordycepic acid).
• Sterols, present in smaller quantities.

Olatunji and colleagues published an extensive review of the genus in Fitoterapia in 2018, cataloguing the traditional uses, the phytochemistry and the pharmacological literature. It is the best single starting point if you want to read the field rather than the marketing.

Sinensis vs Militaris: The Comparison Nobody Sells You

Further reading: our full breakdown of what the Cordyceps militaris studies actually show, and the species page for Cordyceps militaris.

People Search for "Yarsagumba Benefits." Here Is the Honest Answer.

Thirteen hundred people a month in India search that phrase. They deserve a straight response rather than a sales page.

There is no proven health benefit of Keeda Jadi that we are permitted to claim, and none that the published evidence would support if we were.

What exists is this. A long and well documented history of use in Tibetan and Chinese practice, where the fungus was recorded among the rarest of mountain materials and was reserved for people who could afford it. A modern literature that is mostly preclinical, mostly small, and mostly conducted on extracts rather than the whole dried fungus. And a body of chemistry that describes what is present without establishing what it does.

Anyone telling you it will do a specific thing to a specific organ is either guessing or breaking the law. In India, health claims on food supplements are governed by the FSSAI Advertising and Claims Regulations, and a claim without substantiation is an offence. We take that seriously, and we would rather lose the sale.

Real or Fake: How to Check

Adulteration is common, because the price makes it worthwhile. Fakes are moulded from flour and starch, or are a different, cheaper insect-fungus pairing sold under the same name. Some strands are weighted with wire or lead to sell heavier.

Four things to look at before you buy anything.

1. The stroma emerges from the head end. Not from the middle, not from the tail. If it does not, it is not Ophiocordyceps sinensis.
2. The caterpillar is segmented, with visible legs. Count them. A moulded fake has smooth or vague segmentation.
3. Break one. The interior of a real strand is white and fibrous, and shows a dark line running through it. Flour fakes are uniform.
4. Weight. A real strand is startlingly light. Metal-weighted fakes are not.

Buy from someone who will tell you the district, the season and the grade. If they cannot, they do not know where it came from.

Is Yarsagumba Banned in India?

No. Possession and personal use are not banned.

What is regulated is the harvest. Collection is controlled at state level in Uttarakhand, with permits issued to local collectors and cooperatives, and quantities monitored. Export is restricted. The intent of the rules is conservation rather than prohibition.

The confusion usually comes from Nepal, where collection was formally banned until 2001 and is now permitted under licence, and from periodic seizures of undocumented cross-border consignments.

Wang Junxia, 1993: The Story, and the Rest of It

Side Effects and Cautions

Keeda Jadi has been consumed in the Himalaya for centuries and is generally well tolerated. That is not the same as being risk-free, and the following is worth knowing.

• People with a known mould or fungal allergy should avoid it.
• Anyone taking prescribed medication, anyone pregnant or nursing, and anyone managing a medical condition should speak to a qualified practitioner first.
• Adulteration is the real risk. Documented cases of lead poisoning have arisen from metal-weighted counterfeit strands, not from the fungus itself.
• Long-term human data does not exist. Nobody can tell you what daily use across a decade looks like, because nobody has studied it.

How Keeda Jadi Is Prepared

Traditionally, whole strands are simmered. One to two strands are rinsed under cold water, added to about a cup of water, and simmered gently for ten to fifteen minutes until the liquid reduces by roughly half. The tea is drunk and the rehydrated strand is eaten whole.

Nothing is discarded. In Tibetan and Himalayan kitchens the strands are also added to broths and to chicken or mutton stock, where they simmer alongside the meat.

This is a preparation method, not a dose. We do not publish a dosage, because a dosage implies a therapeutic purpose, and this is a food.

Why Keeda Jadi Costs What It Costs

So: a thing that cannot be farmed, is found only by hand, in a window of weeks, in a few valleys, by communities whose livelihoods now depend on it, and which is getting scarcer.

That is the price. Not a marketing position. Arithmetic.

A Thousand Years, One Short Spring

Keeda Jadi is not a formula. It is a fungus that colonises a caterpillar beneath Himalayan turf, is found by hand in a few short weeks, and cannot be made in a laboratory by anyone, at any price.

That is the whole story, and it is enough.

The meadows of Pithoragarh, where the stroma is searched for on hands and knees