Bilberry: History and Discovery
Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) has been gathered and eaten across northern Europe for as long as people have lived there, but its history as a studied antioxidant is surprisingly modern. The wild berry spent centuries as food and folk remedy before chemists in the early twentieth century worked out what gives it — and every red, purple, and blue fruit — its colour: a family of pigments called anthocyanins. This article traces what the record actually supports: the meaning of the berry's many regional names; its traditional uses in European households; the famous (and largely mythical) Second World War story that it sharpened pilots' night vision; the laboratory work, crowned by a Nobel Prize, that first identified the anthocyanin pigments; the moment in the early 1970s when a standardized bilberry extract was first made; and the wave of modern research that tested the old reputation against measured evidence. Where the record is firm that is stated; where a claim is folklore or still argued over, it is named as such.
Table of Contents
A Berry of Many Names
Few plants carry as many local names as bilberry, and that abundance is itself a clue to how deeply the berry was woven into everyday life. The English word bilberry is generally traced to a Scandinavian origin — it is closely related to the Danish bøllebær — and entered English use centuries ago. Across the British Isles the same small dark berry is called blaeberry in Scotland, and whortleberry, whinberry, winberry, or wimberry in different English regions; in Ireland it is the fraughan. On the continent the French call it myrtille and the Germans Blaubeere (literally "blue berry") or Heidelbeere.
The botanical name tells its own small story. Vaccinium myrtillus places the plant in the heath family (Ericaceae), the same genus as the cranberry, lingonberry, and the North American blueberries. The species name myrtillus means "little myrtle," a reference to the way the low, neat shrub resembles the unrelated myrtle plant — which is also why the French name is myrtille. This thicket of names matters for the history that follows: because bilberry was a familiar wild food known by a different word in nearly every valley, it was used long before anyone wrote a careful botanical or chemical account of it.
Centuries of Food and Folk Medicine
Long before it was an "antioxidant," bilberry was simply one of the most important wild fruits of northern and central Europe. It grows on heaths, moorlands, and the floors of coniferous forests across Scandinavia, the Baltic, the British uplands, the Alps, and into northern Asia, and it has been hand-gathered there for food — eaten fresh, dried for winter, and cooked into jams, juices, pies, and soups — for a very long time. Bilberries have been picked from the wild rather than cultivated on a commercial scale like the North American blueberry, which is part of why the berry kept its reputation as a special seasonal harvest.
Alongside its place at the table, bilberry has a documented history in traditional European medicine, used over the centuries for a range of complaints. The two best-attested folk uses point straight at the directions modern research would later take. First, the dried fruit was a common household remedy for diarrhoea and digestive upset — a use plausibly explained by the astringent tannins in the berry. Second, the leaves were brewed as a tea in an attempt to lower blood sugar; a 2010 history of the remedy by Helmstädter and Schuster describes bilberry leaf as one of the most frequently used plant-based antidiabetic remedies before the discovery of insulin, and concludes that a century of animal, clinical, and chemical studies has been "more or less disappointing" and does not support that traditional use. The berry was also associated traditionally with eye complaints and with the health of the small blood vessels.
Two honest cautions belong with this folk record. The leaf and the fruit are not interchangeable: bilberry leaf has a different chemistry, and the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) states that the leaves may be unsafe in high doses or over long periods, whereas the fruit is considered safe in amounts typically found in foods — a distinction the old remedies did not always draw. And a long tradition of use is a reason to investigate a plant, not proof that it works. What the folk record reliably tells us is that European communities reached for bilberry, in food and in medicine, for centuries — and that the uses they emphasised (the gut, blood sugar, the eyes, the blood vessels) are strikingly close to what later science chose to study.
The WWII Night-Vision Legend
No history of bilberry is complete without its most famous — and most misleading — story. The popular legend holds that during the Second World War, British Royal Air Force night-fighter pilots ate bilberry jam before sorties and reported greatly improved night vision, and that this anecdote launched the scientific interest in bilberry and the eye.
The historical reality is that this belongs to a well-documented wartime cover story. The RAF's real advantage in finding enemy aircraft in the dark came from a closely guarded new technology: airborne interception radar. To explain the night-fighters' success without revealing radar, wartime publicity credited the pilots' sharp eyesight to their diet — most famously to carrots (rich in vitamin A), which is why the belief that "carrots help you see in the dark" persists to this day. The carrot version is the one for which the documentary record is firmest (historians still debate how far that publicity was aimed at the enemy and how far at the home front); bilberry became attached to the same family of diet-and-night-vision stories as folklore, and over the decades the bilberry-jam telling took on a life of its own in supplement marketing. NCCIH's summary puts it the same way: British pilots are reported to have eaten bilberry jam, which "may have been superstition or a deliberate hoax to help conceal improvements in radar," and the story prompted research on bilberry and night vision.
So what does careful research actually show? When the night-vision claim was put to a rigorous test, it did not hold up in healthy people with normal sight. A frequently cited 2000 double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial by Muth, Laurent, and Jasper, run at a US Navy aerospace research laboratory in 15 young men with good vision (160 mg of a 25%-anthocyanoside extract three times a day for 3 weeks), found no difference in night visual acuity or night contrast sensitivity between bilberry and placebo. A 2004 systematic review by Canter and Ernst in Survey of Ophthalmology identified 12 placebo-controlled trials; the 4 most recent were all randomized and all negative, while a fifth randomized trial and 7 non-randomized trials reported positive effects, and the negative results went with the more rigorous methods. The reviewers concluded that rigorous studies do not support the idea that bilberry improves normal night vision, and noted that rigorous research in people whose night vision is impaired by eye disease was entirely absent.
The honest summary is that the wartime night-vision legend is folklore, not pharmacology: bilberry does not turn a normally sighted person into a night-vision specialist. That matters historically, because this single myth did more than almost anything else to make bilberry famous — and the real, more measured evidence for the berry's effects on eye strain and on the small blood vessels is more interesting than the story it grew out of.
Naming the Pigment: The Discovery of Anthocyanins
For most of its history bilberry was used long before anyone could say what was inside it. The turning point came not with bilberry specifically but with the chemistry of plant colour. The deep blue-purple that stains the fingers when you crush a bilberry comes from a family of water-soluble pigments now called anthocyanins — from the Greek for "flower" (anthos) and "blue" (kyanos) — and the people who first isolated and made sense of them worked in the early twentieth century.
The central figure is the German chemist Richard Willstätter. In the years around 1913, working with co-workers and following his celebrated studies of chlorophyll, Willstätter isolated and characterised the coloured compounds of flowers and fruits, naming core pigments such as cyanidin (from the cornflower and the red rose), pelargonidin, and delphinidin. A striking part of his account was that the same pigment could appear in different colours depending on its chemical environment, which he attributed to acidity (pH) — an explanation the Japanese chemist Keita Shibata soon challenged with a theory of metal complexes, beginning a long line of research into why some flowers are blue. Willstätter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1915 — officially "for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll" and his work on the anthocyanins is part of that legacy.
The story was carried forward by the British chemist Robert Robinson and his collaborators, who over the following decades worked out how to synthesise anthocyanins in the laboratory and described how colourless companion molecules can shift and stabilise their colour (the "co-pigment" effect, discussed in the Robinsons' 1931 Survey of Anthocyanins). Robinson received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1947 for his broader work on plant products. Together, Willstätter and Robinson turned anthocyanins from a mystery of colour into a defined class of molecules — the chemical identity that bilberry research would later be built on.
It is worth being precise about what this means for bilberry's story. No single scientist "discovered" bilberry, and these chemists were not studying bilberry in particular; what they discovered was the kind of molecule responsible for its colour and for much of its biological activity. Bilberry is unusually rich in these pigments — analyses identify 15 different anthocyanins built on five of the six common dietary anthocyanidins (delphinidin, cyanidin, petunidin, peonidin, and malvidin), and the fruit is pigmented through the whole flesh rather than just the skin — which is exactly why, once the chemistry was understood, bilberry became one of the berries researchers turned to first.
From Wild Berry to Standardized Extract
Knowing that anthocyanins existed was one thing; turning a perishable wild berry into a consistent, measurable medicine was another. That step came in the second half of the twentieth century in Italy. The first standardized bilberry extract is generally credited to an Italian phytochemical manufacturer, which by its own account developed it in the early 1970s: a concentrated extract whose anthocyanin content could be measured and held constant from batch to batch. The reference figure that came out of this work — an extract standardized to about 36% anthocyanins, commonly expressed as about 25% anthocyanidins — became the benchmark used in much of the clinical research and in later trials such as a 2013 Scottish glucose study.
This standardized material is the one that underlies most of the serious clinical research. It appears in the literature as a standardized bilberry extract (36% anthocyanins), also sold in Italy as a medicinal product, and according to its manufacturer it was evaluated clinically mainly for vascular uses — the small blood vessels and venous circulation — rather than as the night-vision aid of legend. When a study says it used "bilberry extract," it most often means this kind of standardized anthocyanin preparation.
Standardization is the quiet but decisive event in bilberry's modern history. Fresh fruit, juice, and jam vary enormously in pigment content and are dilute besides; a defined extract made it possible to give a known dose, run controlled trials, and compare results. It also created a commercial problem that persists: because authentic bilberry extract is expensive and wild-harvested, it is a frequent target for adulteration with cheaper anthocyanin sources. A 2006 analysis found one extract labelled 25% anthocyanins that contained about 9% anthocyanins plus the synthetic red dye amaranth, which a simple colour assay could not tell apart; a 2014 Italian study found that about half of 14 commercial bilberry extracts differed significantly from the reference bilberry profile (mainly through mulberry and chokeberry), and that about 60% of the extracts and a third of 12 finished supplements held less anthocyanin than declared. The history here cuts both ways — standardization is what made bilberry a researchable substance, and it is also where the documented quality problems in today's market are concentrated.
Putting the Reputation to the Test
With a defined extract in hand, the last half-century of bilberry's story has been the testing of its inherited reputation against measured evidence — and the results have sorted the folklore from the substance. The night-vision claim, as described above, largely failed in people with normal sight. But other long-held uses fared better. The most consistent (though limited) positive human data concern eye strain (asthenopia): two randomized, placebo-controlled Japanese trials in office workers with screen-related eye fatigue — 480 mg a day for 8 weeks in 2015, and 240 mg a day for 12 weeks in 2020 (two of whose three authors worked for a supplement company) — reported improvements in some objective and subjective measures of eye fatigue, but not all.
The clearest match between tradition and evidence, though, is the one the European extract was built for: the small blood vessels. The proposed mechanism is that bilberry anthocyanins stabilise capillaries, reduce their leakiness, and support venous tone, and the clinical work concerns the leg symptoms of chronic venous insufficiency — aching, heaviness, and swelling — mainly in older, small studies published in Italian. The old folk use of the berry for the circulation and for capillary fragility lines up with this vascular research. Meanwhile, the blood-sugar tradition has been revisited with the fruit rather than the leaf: in a 2013 crossover study of 8 men with diet-controlled type 2 diabetes, a single 0.47 g capsule of standardized extract before a glucose-equivalent drink produced a smaller post-meal rise in glucose and insulin than placebo, and in a 2012 Finnish dietary trial (15 people eating the equivalent of 400 g of fresh bilberries a day versus 12 controls, all with features of metabolic syndrome) an inflammation score differed in favour of the bilberry group while glucose and lipid measures did not change. Both studies are small.
The detailed mechanisms, dosing, forms, and cautions for all of these are covered on the main Bilberry page; this history is concerned only with how the berry came to be used and studied in the first place. The pattern that emerges is the genuinely interesting feature of bilberry's story: the uses an old European tradition emphasised — the gut, the eyes, the blood vessels, blood sugar — are very nearly the same ones modern trials chose to test, and where the evidence is strongest (eye strain, and the older capillary and venous studies), it lines up with the tradition rather than with the myth.
What the History Honestly Tells Us
Bilberry's history is a useful case study in how a traditional food becomes a studied antioxidant, and in how easily fact and legend blur along the way. Three threads run through it. The first is folk knowledge: centuries of European households using the fruit for the gut and the eyes, and the leaf for blood sugar, in advance of any chemistry. The second is laboratory science: the early-twentieth-century discovery of the anthocyanin pigments by Willstätter and Robinson, which gave the berry's colour and activity a molecular identity, and the early-1970s Italian standardized extract that finally made the active fraction measurable and testable. The third is myth: the wartime night-vision story, which made bilberry famous for something it does not reliably do.
Separating those threads is the whole point of knowing the history. A long tradition of use earned bilberry its place in the laboratory; careful research has since found modest, limited support for some of that reputation (eye-strain relief in small trials, capillary and venous symptoms in older studies), tempered other parts of it (blood sugar, retinal conditions — preliminary; the leaf tradition for diabetes was not borne out), and dismantled the most famous claim of all (night vision in healthy eyes). The honest version of bilberry's story is more modest than the marketing but more durable: a genuinely pigment-rich wild berry, understood molecule by molecule over the last hundred years, whose real strengths turn out to be the quiet ones the old folk uses pointed to all along.
Key Research Papers
The list below combines key peer-reviewed sources on Vaccinium myrtillus (bilberry) and on the history of the anthocyanin pigments with curated PubMed topic-search links into the relevant literature. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID, or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab. Historical attributions not drawn from these papers are sourced in the text: Willstätter's Nobel Prize (Nobel Foundation), the wartime radar story (NCCIH and published histories of the carrot publicity), and the early-1970s Italian standardized extract (the manufacturer's own account).
- Muth ER, Laurent JM, Jasper P. The effect of bilberry nutritional supplementation on night visual acuity and contrast sensitivity. Alternative Medicine Review. 2000;5(2):164-173. — PubMed PMID: 10767671
- Canter PH, Ernst E. Anthocyanosides of Vaccinium myrtillus (bilberry) for night vision — a systematic review of placebo-controlled trials. Survey of Ophthalmology. 2004;49(1):38-50. — doi:10.1016/j.survophthal.2003.10.006
- Chu WK, Cheung SCM, Lau RAW, Benzie IFF. Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) In: Benzie IFF, Wachtel-Galor S, editors. Herbal Medicine: Biomolecular and Clinical Aspects. 2nd ed. CRC Press/Taylor & Francis; 2011. — NCBI Bookshelf: NBK92770
- Mattioli R, Francioso A, Mosca L, Silva P. Anthocyanins: a comprehensive review of their chemical properties and health effects on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Molecules. 2020;25(17):3809. — doi:10.3390/molecules25173809
- Ștefănescu R, Laczkó-Zöld E, Ősz BE, Vari CE. An updated systematic review of Vaccinium myrtillus leaves: phytochemistry and pharmacology. Pharmaceutics. 2023;15(1):16. — doi:10.3390/pharmaceutics15010016
- Helmstädter A, Schuster N. Vaccinium myrtillus as an antidiabetic medicinal plant — research through the ages. Pharmazie. 2010;65(5):315-321. — PubMed PMID: 20503920
- Robinson GM, Robinson R. A survey of anthocyanins. I. Biochemical Journal. 1931;25(5):1687-1705. — PubMed PMID: 16744735
- Yoshida K. Tracing the genealogy of research on the mechanism of blue flower coloration by anthocyanin based on Keita Shibata's work. Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B. 2024;100(8):446-464. — PubMed PMID: 39401899
- Penman KG, Halstead CW, Matthias A, De Voss JJ, Stuthe JM, Bone KM, Lehmann RP. Bilberry adulteration using the food dye amaranth. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2006;54(19):7378-7382. — PubMed PMID: 16968108
- Gardana C, Ciappellano S, Marinoni L, Fachechi C, Simonetti P. Bilberry adulteration: identification and chemical profiling of anthocyanins by different analytical methods. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2014;62(45):10998-11004. — PubMed PMID: 25365784
- Ozawa Y, Kawashima M, Inoue S, Inagaki E, Suzuki A, Ooe E, Kobayashi S, Tsubota K. Bilberry extract supplementation for preventing eye fatigue in video display terminal workers. Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging. 2015;19(5):548-554. — PubMed PMID: 25923485
- Kosehira M, Machida N, Kitaichi N. A 12-week-long intake of bilberry extract (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) improved objective findings of ciliary muscle contraction of the eye: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group comparison trial. Nutrients. 2020;12(3):600. — PubMed PMID: 32106548
- Hoggard N, Cruickshank M, Moar KM, Bestwick C, Holst JJ, Russell W, Horgan G. A single supplement of a standardised bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) extract (36% wet weight anthocyanins) modifies glycaemic response in individuals with type 2 diabetes controlled by diet and lifestyle. Journal of Nutritional Science. 2013;2:e22. — PubMed PMID: 25191571
- Kolehmainen M, Mykkänen O, Kirjavainen PV, et al. Bilberries reduce low-grade inflammation in individuals with features of metabolic syndrome. Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. 2012;56(10):1501-1510. — PubMed PMID: 22961907
- Vaccinium myrtillus traditional and historical use — PubMed: bilberry traditional use and ethnobotany
- Anthocyanin pigments — discovery, chemistry, and history — PubMed: anthocyanin pigment history and chemistry