What are food supplements?
Food supplements are a food product that is not designed to replace a healthy and balanced diet, but help to supplement it.
They are composed of a concentrate of nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, plant extracts, amino acids, enzymes, etc. that help to remedy nutritional deficiencies by acting at three levels:
- Preventing and correcting nutrient deficiencies.
- Helping to achieve optimal and adequate levels of certain nutrients of which we cannot provide the body with the necessary amounts despite following a balanced diet.
- Helping to supply cells with performance-enhancing substances.
How are the active ingredients of food supplements extracted?
It is very important to consider the method used to extract the active ingredients contained in food supplements because the naturalness and effectiveness of the product depends on it. Using ground plant powder is not the same as using a standardised dry extract in which the active ingredients have been extracted and purified many times over to obtain a high concentration.
There are various extraction methods and the quality of food supplements varies depending on which one is used, as the properties of the active ingredients may be lost. The most common extraction methods are:
- Mechanical extraction: this obtains the active ingredients dissolved in the plant’s own fluids. Once extracted, they are called juice.
- Distillation: this separates the volatile components from the active ingredients that are less volatile or non-volatile. A heat source is used to obtain a liquid composed of two immiscible phases: essential oil (density is <1) and hydrosol (obtained from water distillation).
- Gas stripping: a selective and relatively simple process that eliminates the stripper gas by controlling the temperature and pressure exerted during extraction.
- Solvent extraction: this consists of mixing the part of the plant or fruit that contains the active ingredient with a solvent that is able to solubilise its active ingredients.
At Probelte Pharma we use a patented physical extraction method that uses ultrapure water, without using organic solvents or any other chemicals, in order to preserve the concentration and quality of the active ingredients.
Physical extraction by Probelte Pharma
Probelte Pharma has patented this purely physical extraction method that involves no chemical reactions.
Our physical extraction method consists of using only aqueous solutions with demineralised water to obtain the active ingredients, without any organic solvents, synthetic chemicals or radiation.
These purely physical extraction processes include:
- Centrifugation
- Chromatography
- Tangential flow filtration
This gives us a competitive edge over our competitors, who, in order to extract more active ingredients, use chemicals, irradiation and organic solvents such as ethanol or methanol for extraction.
At Probelte Pharma, using this patented chemical-free physical extraction method, we obtain extracts with a high concentration of active ingredients because we use whole, fresh fruits that are harvested at peak ripeness and not frozen.
This allows us to produce high-quality food supplements, containing natural extracts of pomegranates and olives, with a high concentration of active ingredients such as:
- Pomanox, with a high concentration of antioxidant polyphenol punicalagins from pomegranates. These are mostly obtained from the peel and pith, as this is where the highest concentration of antioxidants is found.
- Mediteanox, which contains high levels of the polyphenolic antioxidant hydroxytyrosol, which is found in olives.