dosages; standardized extracts

[Guest guest]

Herbal standardization is one of the bogeymen that Codex has been pushing

on an international scale, and I've issued warnings about this issue for

several years. See:

 

http://www.rmhiherbal.org/review/2003-2.html#t-bioc

Orwellian schemes for maximizing health-care industry profits

- How these endanger the practice of herbal medicine

Section: Promote adoption of regulatory standardization of

biochemical profiles for herbal products.

 

While I warned against mandatory standardization, from the discussion

below, I suspect now that even voluntary standardization will become a

means for deception and substitution of inferior drug-like products.

 

Chemical profiling of herbs can be a very useful thing, but too often

people make glib assumptions about the relationship between clinical

functions and chemical constituents. This is a result of the simplistic

assumption that the action of many herbs is due to a small handful of

" active " ingredients. While this perspective might be useful for

understanding herbs like rauwolfia or ephedra, it is naive when applying to

herbs like ginseng or ginger, which have hundreds of closely related

chemicals that form " families " with similar functions.

 

The more reputable companies use chemical profiling to ensure that their

already high-quality products meet certain criteria. Unethical companies

will use this same technology to deceive and to sell an inferior product by

doctoring it up with synthetic chemicals. So the technology itself is

neutral, it's the people and companies who abuse it who are the problem.

 

Years ago I wrote an article that outlined the necessary steps that must be

taken to relate the chemistry of an herb to its clinical functions:

http://www.rmhiherbal.org/review/2000-3.html

Sadly, most articles or scientific studies of plant pharmacology come

nowhere near these criteria.

 

Roger

 

 

> " Eric Brand " <smilinglotus

>Re: dosages

>

>Andy Ellis was recently discussing the issue of standardized extracts.

> He said that in fact, the standardized extracts are made by

>introducing a known quantity of isolated marker chemicals into an

>extact. For example, standardized extracts of ginseng are made by

>using a poor quality ginseng and adding in isolated ginsenosides so

>that it has a consistent minimum percentage. The isolated

>ginsenosides are taken from ginseng whiskers (ren shen xu), which are

>dirt cheap. The whiskers have very high levels of ginsenosides but

>their ginsenoside profile is inferior to that found in the root body.

> So I would have to agree with Bob Flaw's assessment that these

>products are basically unknown new drugs- extracts of dubious quality

>base ingredients with isolated or synthetic marker chemicals added,

>most likely skewing the natural ratio of chemicals that the whole

>extract contains.

>

>I was under the same impression that Alon has expressed, that the

>extracts were full-spectrum and just met a minimum standard. Andy

>claims just the opposite, and he is a specialist in this area. Maybe

>both products exist in the market.

>

>Eric

>

> , " "

><alonmarcus@w...> wrote:

>> Bob, in your blue poppy promo you wrote " Standardized fractional

>extracts refer to extracting the supposed active ingredient from an

>herb and then concentrating that single chemical to a certain

>standard...the danger of including so-called standardized fractional

>chemical extracts from medicinal herbs in dietary supplements is that

>we are basically introducing new classes of drugs into our food supply

>which do not have the documented safe use history enjoyed by the whole

>herbs from which these chemical fractions are derived " However, most

>so-called standardized extracts on the market are actually full

>spectrum extracts. The standardization only means that one of the

>chemical ingredient is at a fixed level so that there may be some

>consistency between batches.

>>

>>

>>

>>

>> Oakland, CA 94609

>>

>>

>>