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Herbs

What to look for when buying herbal supplements.
by Kenneth J. Frank, M.D.

Article

What to look for when buying herbal supplements.

How do you decide which are the best quality herbs?

Buy from a reputable company, like APP, a company you can trust-one that pays attention to quality and makes sure the herbs are processed as extracts soon after gathering them from the fields while still fresh. Next it is important to know the difference between herbal powders and herbal extracts. Herbal powders are simply ground up plants and frequently of low potency. On the other hand, herbal extracts have higher concentrates of the active ingredients you want and are more potent. It is best to use botanical extracts, rather than less effective powders. Most store bought herbals are simply powders. APP never uses herbal powders. We use extracts of the highest quality and potency.

Why spray-dried ratio extracts are better than powders.

Spray-dried ratio extracts are better than powders. Creating an herbal extract is usually accomplished by careful methods of soaking herbs at precise temperatures in solutions of water. This draws the active ingredients out of the herb and into the solution. This solution is then sprayed onto fresh dry herbs of the same type. The final product is called an herbal extract. If 4 pounds of original herb are used to obtain a final herbal extract of one pound, this is called a spray-dried-extract with a ratio of 4:1 (listed on the label). It is four times more potent than the original powdered herb. An 8:1 extract would be two times more potent than a 4:1 extract made from the same batch of herbs. A 32:1 extract would be 4 times more potent than an 8:1 extract.

Standardized extracts are better for knowing exactly what you are buying.

Standardized extracts are even better for knowing exactly what you are buying. Standardized extracts are a way of guaranteeing the same potency from batch to batch and bottle to bottle. A standardized extract is prepared the same as the spray-dried-extract. It is guaranteed to contain a minimum percentage of a particular marker compound (usually one of the active ingredients in the herb). For instance, APP uses the highest potency standardized red clover extract existing. It is guaranteed to contain a minimum of 15% isoflavones: these are the important active ingredients that are phytoestrogens. It is the isoflavone content that is important for you to compare when looking at red clover products from different companies. One of the APP products with red clover is called Red Clover and Soy Extract and on the label is listed 270 mg of red clover extract per capsule. Since this is a 15% standardized red clover extract (standardized to the isoflavone content), it has 41 mg of isoflavones (15% of 270 mg) from red clover.

Comparing APP?s Red Clover Standardized Extract to that of Promensil™

Promensil™, a popular patented red clover extract from Europe, comes in a 500 mg. table, but if you look on its label at the isoflavone content per tablet, it is listed as 40 mg. Therefore, the APP product may have less total red clover extract per capsule (270 vs. 500mg), but it contains more isoflavones from red clover per capsule (41 vs. 40mg) than the Promensil has in its tablet and, therefore, is a more potent product. If you look further on the APP label, you will see that it also contains 100mg of soy extract. Under this is listed 10mg of isoflavones because the soy extract is guaranteed to contain a minimum of 10% isoflavones (10% of 100mg is 10mg). The entire APP product contains 51mg of isoflavones total-from soy and red clover combined. When looking at labels that have standardized extracts, you will always see the compounds to which they are standardized listed below the extract name and indented. Always compare the amount of this marker compound and not just the total amount of the extract if you want to correctly compare potencies. In cases where only powders are used, you will not see any marker compound listed below the name of the herb, and you will not see any ratio either. Don?t buy herbal powders, only extracts like those provided by APP.