Comment · Wed, May 25, 2022 · ND Owner
DRIED PARSLEY = superior to any Apigenin supplement. Rebut me if you can.
What they were answering
AnabolicGreyhound · 10 points
Of course, plant compounds are derived from whole foods and in many cases taking a supplement is more efficacious than consuming masses of a specific plant, I never suggested otherwise.
Aaand yes, as with anything that occurs in nature, it’s constituents have not been standardised. Yet, dried parsley seems to be widely recognised as the most abundant source of Apigenin by far - with estimates suggesting it comprises just under 5% of the compound. If this is incorrect please do publish the results as would be fascinated to see how they vary.
As a lover of dried* parsley, I have no trouble incorporating say 5 grams into an evening meal or better yet, cheese sauce!
Moreover, the best bioavailability is when apigenin is bound to beta glycosides (a molecule of sugar that comes from food). When we have a diet with foods like parsley, which has a high content of apigenin that is bound to the beta glycosides, it increases the digestibility.
Also… the study you cited refers to use of fresh and not dried parsley - the former is known to have a significantly lower Apigenin content - I am speaking solely of dried parsley.
Human trials do demonstrate superior bioavailability of Apigenin derived from whole foods versus that which is taken in a standardised supplementary form.
So, I guess you have to weigh this against the points you have raised I.e. the concentrated dose and puri…
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
No, I get what you are saying. Sometimes it's more complex than X% of something works the same in any formulation or form. Certainly the entourage effect comes into play, which is why we offer lower standardizations of things. Take horny goat weed for example. I like our 10% more than our 50% for that reason. It's more pharmacologically complex, even if the concentration of the main active is lower. There are other things in plants that don't come over in some extracts. Volatile organic compounds are big ones. So things like volatile terpenes might not come over in a super concentrated ethanol extract. This is why we are doing more supercritical CO2 extracts that keep some of those volatiles in. It's also why we are working with CAMAG on their new HP-TLC-MS machine. We just got confirmation yesterday, in fact, that they will be lending that machine to us to help in our kratom project with Waters. We are working with both Waters and CAMAG to determine other compounds in kratom leaves, and write application notes for ID and assay of those compounds. While we have that machine, we will be using it to discover interesting bands that we see in other things like tongkat, cistanche, and polygala. We see some strong bands in non-extracted plant materials sometimes that we don't see in the extracts. This mass spec that will sit on the end of our CAMAG HP-TLC line will allow us to figure out what those bands are, and determine if mixing in some non-extracted whole plant would positively benefit the effects. So I am just busting your balls here. I know it's more complex than just X% of something gives a certain effect. We are just all about consistency, standardization, and validation. Speculation and anecdotal results are fun, but we always try to connect the science in the end. If a whole plant would give good effects, that's great! However, we would need to then do all the testing to ensure the whole plant is consistent batch-to-batch, and that we know the numbers behind it. A standardized whole parsley product could be cool. This goes for a lot of flavones/flavonoids, actually. Taking different flavonoids together almost always improves the bioavailability of the others.
The glycoside issue is also another variable that most people don't realize. It's actually not apigenin in parsley. It's apiin, or apigenin-7-O-apiosylglucoside. There are tons of different glycosides of flavones that are usually what is found naturally in a plant product. The body then deglycosylates them to the aglycones before absorption. We have different methods for total flavones and total flavone glycosides in the lab, as the chromatography is very different. Usually the deglycosylated versions are more expensive to make. Take bacalin and baicalein. The aglycone is much more expensive than the glycoside version. Generally that is the more bioavailable version, though. This is because it skips the rate-limiting deglycosylation step in the body. Is that the case for apigenin? I am not sure. Would combining pure apigenin with some of the other compounds parsley really kick the bioavailability up a notch? Perhaps. I think we would need more data to say for sure. A lot of studies confuse people by saying apigenin, when it was actually apiin found naturally in the plant.