The quality of active ingredients is the most important criteria for your selection of supplements

When choosing a natural supplement the form plays a primary role: capsules, tablets, powders, liquids or microgranules?
Meanwhile, the quality of the ingredients it contains and more particularly the active ingredients are even more important.

First of all, ingredients should be of natural source, with no coloring agent, GMO, pesticide and preservative free.

Secondly, the content in a product of a specific plant or fruit doesn’t guarantee its efficiency. For most of them, what is important is the content of the active ingredients: the part of the ingredient that is active and known to have a beneficial action in the body.

For example, what is of interest in the red vine is its content in flavonoids – a polyphenolic compound known to support the circulatory system, the same way you should look for the content of 10HDA in a royal jelly product, this content guarantees a quality royal jelly when it is higher than 1.6%.

The content of active ingredients is not constant from one plant harvest to another, i.e. 10 kgs of oranges from 2 different harvests may not contain the same quantity of Vitamin C. For this reason, using extracts that are titrated, gives a guarantee that the content of active ingredients will be constant from one product to the next.

Active ingredients are extracted using a specific hydro alcoholic process – some actives are soluble in water and others in alcohol – followed by nebulization and only the active part of the plant is used. In the case of micro granules, the active ingredient is extracted via a process of evaporation and nebulization.

In many supplement manufacturing processes, the whole dried plant is used (with no guarantee of active content), it is grinded and is often mixed with other neutral agents to form a powder (such as maltodextrin). This considerably reduces the plant content, not to mention the percentage of active ingredients. With the grinding technique, we often find a lot of plant wastage, such as stems or roots.

So what is important to remember is that a plant may be known for these properties, but it is actually all of its active ingredients that determines the action sought.