Health care: natural attraction of plant extracts

With the improvement of living standards and the enhancement of health awareness, people pay more and more attention to the green safety and functional health care of drugs and food Natural and healthy plant extract products are welcomed and respected by more and more consumers The market scale continues to expand By 2013, the global plant extract sales volume has exceeded 54 billion US dollars, and still maintains a rapid growth rate With the support of national industrial policy, the continuous release of market demand and the gradual standardization of the industry, the prospect of plant extract industry is very promising I plant extract overview plant extract is a product formed by taking plants as raw materials, according to the needs of the use of extracted products, through physical and chemical extraction and separation processes, directional acquisition and concentration of one or more effective ingredients in plants without changing the structure of their effective ingredients According to different components, plant extracts can be divided into glycosides, acids, polyphenols, polysaccharides, terpenes, flavonoids, alkaloids and other categories; according to different product properties, they can be divided into plant oil, extract, powder, lens and other categories Plant extracts are rich and diverse At present, there are more than 300 kinds of plant extracts in industry It is a kind of very important intermediate product, which has a wide range of applications It can be used not only in pharmaceutical raw materials, but also in health products, nutritional supplements, food additives, cosmetics and other industries 2 In the early 1980s, developed countries such as Europe and the United States, which basically completed industrialization, set off the trend of returning to nature People's attention and rejection of chemical synthesis products with side effects gradually increased People's preference for natural and safe plant extracts returned and highly praised The industry should rise In 1994, the U.S promulgated the dietary supplement health and Education Act, which officially recognized the use of plant extract as a food supplement, and the plant extract industry developed rapidly Traditional Chinese medicine has a long history in China Medical personnel have always attached great importance to the analysis of plant properties and drug properties By the 1970s, some domestic pharmaceutical factories began to use mechanical equipment to extract plant ingredients, but this was only a production link of drug manufacturing, and did not develop into an independent industry After the mid-1990s, with the deepening of opening up, foreign trade began to flourish, and the plant extract industry, which is less restricted by policies, began to develop Since the 21st century, the plant extract industry has entered a golden age On the one hand, the improvement of living standards and the enhancement of health awareness have driven people's strong demand for plant extract products; on the other hand, it has benefited from the application of more advanced plant extraction technology (such as enzyme extraction, ultrasonic extraction, supercritical extraction, microwave extraction, membrane separation technology, etc.), greatly improving the production efficiency.