What Does Herbal Ratio Extracts & Standardized Extracts Mean?

What makes some herbs and botanical products so utilised and useful are often their active compounds (often present in low percentages).

For example, the active ingredient of Milk Thistle is silymarin, those of blueberry are anthocyanidins and those of kava are kavalactone.

Often these active compounds can express their biological benefits and activities only when administered in quite high content. So an extraction is needed on raw plant material to isolate those active compounds.

When plant material goes through extraction, the active compounds are isolated from the raw material by using a solvent such as water or alcohol, and this is often facilitated by heating to improve the efficiency of the extraction. Without extraction, our bodies are not able to break down and use many of these active compounds because of the solvents and heat required to break them down. So in order to achieve the maximum possible benefits from natural supplements, we rely on extracts rather than the raw plant material.

What's Herbal Standardized Extracts?

Standardized extracts have a standard amount of a specific phytochemical and this content is denoted by a percentage. So for example 1kg of Milk Thistle 80% Powder Extract (80% Silymarin) contains 80g of Silymarin, as Silymarin is thought to be the active phyto-chemical in this plant. A Standardized Extract is processed in order to ensure the active phytochemical always occurs in the exact same standardized ratio, which is not the naturally occurring ratio in the crude herb and quite often its "inert" constituents are removed or reduced. Standardized extracts are often extracted with acetone, benzene, methyl alcohol, butyl alcohol, carbon tetrachloride, and other synthetic chemicals that, are removed from the finished product.

Herbal Extracts used as supplements are often standardized. It is the standardized value often used in marketing, to show the amount of original herb used. Because different products contain different strength extracts this is the best-calculated figure for comparison.

What's Herbal Ratio Extract?

Herbal Ratio Extract refers to the amount of raw plant material used in the extraction process. This is represented by a 4:1, 10:1 or 100:1 ratio, where 4 (10, 100 and etc.) refers to the amount of raw material used during extraction and 1 refers to the final extract. Take Milk Thistle extract 4:1 as example too, which means 4kg milk thistle plant raw material used in the extraction process to get 1kg powder.

Generally, the loss of plant components during the concentrated processing of extracts, such as changes in pigments, sugar conversion, etc., can easily change its color. Of course, the taste also changes due to the loss of volatile oil and fat-soluble components. Therefore, it is reasonable to use the detection of the active compounds to judge the standard of the concentrated ingredients. The color and fragrance can be confused with artificial synthetic substances (pigments, sweeteners).

However, the main detection of ratio extracts is through TLC. This method is mainly used to distinguish whether the product is derived from a certain plant raw material and to identify the authenticity of the plant raw material. Not used to detect active compounds and content.