A doctor gave Brett Austin six weeks to live
This is where the brand story actually begins.
In 2010, when I was 33 years old, I was told by my doctor that I had about six weeks to live and that I should get my affairs in order. As, by this time, I had already died twice, I wasn’t afraid of death but I actually wanted to live and I was having fun on this beautiful earth.
I was grossly overweight, 157kgs, I had lung cancer, from the 100-plus cigarettes a day, cirrhosis of the liver from excessive alcohol abuse and very bad kidney disease, I was a DJ and I ate all the wrong foods.
Brett Austin, founder
He was thirty-three and had been given a date. The medical route on offer was pain relief and medication to manage the symptoms, and by his account it made him feel worse rather than better. So he stopped waiting and started reading.
One plant for every organ: the idea the bottle is built on
What he went looking for was the body itself: what a liver actually does, what kidneys actually do, what twenty years had been doing to both. In his own account, “I went to the Internet and started researching the anatomy of the body and found out that for every symptom there was a plant to heal it, but not only that, I started learning subjects that intrigued my soul.” He has repeated some version of that sentence in every interview since.
For every organ in the body, there is a plant that supports it. That is not a slogan written for a label; it is the rule the recipe was built by.
That rule is why the formula reads like a list rather than a headline. Turmeric, ginger, garlic, lemon, cinnamon, cayenne, black pepper, apple cider vinegar, sea salt and chaga are all in there because each one was chosen against it, and every one has its own page here setting out what is known about it.
Garlic is the clearest example of the idea in practice. It is the ingredient in the bottle with the most substantial body of research behind it at organ level, most of it on the heart and circulation, which is exactly the kind of pairing Brett means when he talks about a plant for an organ.
Garlic, and the heart. Of the ten plants in the bottle it carries the most research at organ level.
It also explains why the plants were not an afterthought that turned up once he was well. They were part of what he was doing while the prognosis still stood, and in his own understanding of what happened they did real work on the organs that were failing. That is how he tells it, and he has never told it any other way.
What he gave up, and what he started making
The giving up happened in a single day rather than gradually. Everything he was eating and drinking went. The cigarettes went, after more than a hundred a day. The drugs stopped. Even the television went out with them, which tells you something about how completely he wanted the previous twenty years gone.
Then he started making things. Boiling, steeping, tasting, adjusting, and throwing most of it away. One of those recipes was worth keeping, and it is the direct ancestor of what is in the bottle today.
Eighteen weeks in he had lost 45 kilograms. Sixteen weeks after that he had lost another twenty, sixty-five in total, and by his own account he had never felt better.
When I next saw my friends and family none of them recognised me and all thought I was now on my way out as I had lost so much weight, but in truth I was feeling amazing.
Is there such a thing as a miracle cure?
No, and Brett is the first person to say so. There is no single tonic, no single pill and no single plant that undoes twenty years on its own.
Two things happened at once in 2010, and he has never separated them. He stopped putting in what was harming him, and he started putting in something he believed would help repair the damage. Neither half would have done it alone. That is the whole shape of his account, and it is the reason he ends up saying it like this.
You can heal anything, but you also have to give up the things that are causing your illnesses in the first place.
How Natural Elixir became a bottle
For a long stretch it was a private thing he made for himself, with no label, no name and no intention of selling anything.
Then people asked for it. Friends first, then their friends, then people he had never met, until a batch made for one man was a standing weekly job that needed a bottle, a label and a decision about whether this was a business or a favour.
It is now made in South Africa in three versions and carried by well over a hundred stockists around the country, and the formula is the one from the kitchen rather than a version reworked to be cheaper or easier to drink.
Pouring it himself at a market stall, which is still how most people meet it for the first time.
The full account is his, and it is a considerably bigger read than this page.
Why Brett still makes every batch himself
Fifteen years on, he is still the one buying the fruit, still the one making it, and still working to the formula he believes saved his life. It has never been reformulated to cost less, keep longer or taste easier, and that is not sentimentality about a recipe. It is a man who is not willing to hand over the thing he credits with getting him out of 2010, and it is the reason the bottle you get this month is the same as the one you got last year.
Still buying the fruit himself, fifteen years later.
What Brett’s story is, and what it is not
Never change or stop prescribed medication because of anything you read here. Never delay seeing a doctor. If you have a diagnosis, the people treating you are the people to talk to about it.
This is Brett’s personal journey and how the elixir was born. It is not a claim about what this tonic will do for anyone else, and it is not a promise of miracles. Natural Elixir is a food made from ten plants, taken alongside medical care and never instead of it.
How the tonic is made
Ten plants and nothing else: turmeric, black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, garlic, lemon, cayenne pepper, apple cider vinegar, sea salt and chaga mushroom. No sugar, no honey, no juice, no filler, and no water added to make it go further. Every one of the ten has its own page here.
It carries no preservative because it does not need one. At pH 3.06 the tonic is acidic enough to keep itself, the same principle behind vinegar and every pickle in your cupboard, and a real-time study put the shelf life at twelve months with nothing added to the bottle.
The numbers on this site are not ours. Sugar, fat, gluten, sodium, energy, pH and shelf life are all measured by FACT Labs in Durban, a SANAS-accredited laboratory. A figure an accredited third party produced is worth more than an adjective we chose.
Where to buy Natural Elixir
A good number of customers still buy it in person, from health shops, pharmacies and markets around the country. The store locator lists every stockist, and it is worth checking before you order if there is one near you.
Otherwise the shop delivers, at a flat R100 anywhere in South Africa and free over R500, usually within two to five working days. A 750 ml bottle holds thirty 25 ml measures, so one bottle is about a month at one a day, which is why most regulars end up on the multipacks. Full delivery terms, our address and how to reach us are on the contact page.
Natural Elixir is a natural health tonic and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always speak to a healthcare professional before changing your diet, supplements, or medication, and never stop prescribed treatment without medical guidance.
