Herbal remedies are widely used for the treatment of various illnesses. They often contain highly active pharmacological components including minerals and trace metals. Herbal plants represent an important class of various traditional medicine systems and, in recent years, they are increasingly used in the primary health care intervention in both developed and developing countries.
There are plenty of suppliers and manufacturers of herb extracts in China and India, basically, most herb ingredients are from Asia because of cheap labor and high pollution. Most herb extracts are from the water&Ethanol method, the pollutions are from the solvents and waste water. That is why most manufacturers origin from developing countries such as China and India. Especial China has a long history of using traditional Chinese medicine.
Except for the assay effective ingredients, there are also two points most responsible buyer cares are heavy metal and pesticide residue.
1. Heavy metal, Plants are the main link in the transfer of heavy metals from the contaminated soil to humans. Heavy metals have a tendency to accumulate in the food chain. Heavy metals have low excretion rates through the kidney which could result in damaging effects on humans even at very low concentrations. Metals such as zinc, copper, iron, manganese, and chromium are essential nutrients; they are important for the physiological and biological functions of the human body. However, an increase in their intake above certain permissible limits can become toxic [8, 9]. In general, a number of health problems were linked to excessive uptake of dietary heavy metals including a decrease in immunological defenses, cardiac dysfunction, fetal malformation, impaired psychosocial and neurological behavior, gastrointestinal cancer, and many others. The heavy metal contamination of herbal remedies has been reported earlier in several Asian, South American, and African herbal products in different countries.
There are mainly five data of Heavy Metals which should be tested as below:
Total Heavy Metals
Arsenic(As)
Lead(Pb)
Mercury(Hg)
Cadmium(Cd)
The USP standard normally requests the total heavy metals data not above than 10ppm-20ppm. Eur Ph standard normally not above 10ppm.CPh standard is close to USP standard. However most herb extracts has not been add to the USP or Eur Ph, or even they are in the USP standard, there is no request of limitation on heavy metal which leads to some manufacturers with no standard of heavy metal for herbal extracts too. The only way you can do is to request a COA to check the data of heavy metal. If there is no item of heavy metal which possible they have not tested it and the heavy metal maybe exceeding. This does not mean the quality is not good, just because there is no request or standard, it will depend on yourself request.
2. Pesticide residue, because the wild Chinese herbal medicines are hard to meet the large demand of the domestic and international markets, medicinal materials are also increasingly widely cultivated. To raise the yield, the planters have to use fertilizers and pesticides which will definitely cause the pesticide residue.
Pesticide residues refer to the trace pesticides remaining in organisms, agricultural products (or food) and the environment after the use of pesticides. In addition to pesticides themselves, they also include toxic metabolites and impurities of pesticides. They are the general term of pesticides and other related substances. The amount of pesticide residue remaining is called residue, expressed in milligrams (mg/kg) per kilogram of the sample. Pesticide residue is an inevitable phenomenon after application, but if the maximum residue limit is exceeded, there will be a risk of adverse effects on humans and animals or poisoning organisms in the ecosystem through the food chain.
A professional factory will have professional membrane filtration equipment to filter out the Heavy metal residues and Pesticide residues,and will finally meet the export request as the CPh request ≤0.2mg/kg on most herbal extracts which you can check this item on the COA. However some manufacturer may not show this item, a professional manufacturer will have a standard for pesticide residue.
So these herbal extracts from Asia are basically from artificial cultivation without organic standard:
1. Mushrooms extract, such as
-
lion’s mane mushroom
- Chaga Mushroom
- Rieshi Mushroom
There is one rare raw material which can not get from artificial cultivation is Cordyceps, but you hardly get real one because of high prices. some used cordyceps flower to replace cordyceps, both of them have nothing similar except the name.
2. Ginseng as :
- Panax Ginseng
- Korean ginseng
- Ashwagandha
3.Some normal ones:
- Ginkgo Biloba
- Milk Thistle
- Resveratrol
- Turmeric
- Valerian Root Extract
Still,there is a small part of popular nature nootropics from herbs are from wild:
- Bocopa Monnieri Extract
- Rhodiola Rosea Extract
- Huperzine A
- Pine Bark Extract
Anyway,Nootropicsorigin will choose and control the quality of best nature nootropics for you.