Natural ingredients

Image by: Image of wild mint

A sun ripened tomato tastes better than a truck ripened one. And it probably contains much more lycopene* too. If you’re using natural ingredients, like we do, you have to make sure that they are of the same quality. Pharmacist Ieva Imbrasaite and biologist Kim Søholt Larsen explains more.

“It would be easier to make herbal remedies if the plants stayed exactly the same all the time, says Kim. He explains it like wine. “We all know that wines are different from one grape to another, but a wine from Italy is also different from a wine based on the same grape in France. And in the same way, herbs vary from region to region and year to year.”

This is why it’s important to get herbs from the same areas, with similar climates and soil. “It’s also important to measure the active ingredients, because if one batch of wild mint differs a lot from the one before, it’s not going to result in the same product,” explains Kim.

Ieva, who is responsible for the production in Sprunk- Jansen, agrees; “While we trust in the plants, we need some sort of control that their quality is consistent and that they contain the active ingredients that can help people,” says Ieva. “There are two ways to control the quality of the extracts,” she continues. “A thin layer chromatography, or TLC, can identify the active ingredients in an extract, while a high pressure liquid chromatography, or HPLC, can identify the amount of active ingredients.”

“A HPLC test would enable you to see the exact quantities of active ingredients in an extract, just like you know how much acetylsalicylic acid there’s in an aspirin tablet,” Ieva explains. “The problem, however, is that herbs are more complex than that. We know that oleuropein is the main active ingredient in olive leaves, but there are many other active substances in olive leaf that we haven’t even got names for yet.”

Kim adds that; “A chemical analysis finds the substances that you know you’re looking for, but there are a lot of substances that are there in really small amounts. This means that there will always be effects that we don’t know, and then it’s important to remember that these traditional remedies have been tested for centuries, and if they were toxic or ineffective, we would know about it.”

“In the old days, people used the whole plant, and our products are based on this tradition. That’s why we first of all identify the whole plant in an extract. When we get a batch of Weighlevel tablets, we can do a TLC test to see if it contains all the four herbs that it should,” says Ieva.

* Lycopene is a bright red phytochemical found in tomatoes and other red fruits & vegetables, such as red carrots, watermelons and papayas