Comment · Wed, December 14, 2022 · ND Owner
How does ND lemonbalm have only 1% rosemaric acid ?
Original post in this thread
Imaginary-Play-7804 · 3 points
Hello, just wanted to ask, on examine.com it is claimed that lemon balm plant has 2.2-5.5% rosemaric acid. If that is so how does ND lemon balm have only 1%? Is it "watered down" or am I reading one of the two wrong?
From examine.com
* "Melissa officinalis (Labiatae) at 2.2-5.5%, although it can be higher if specific extracts are taken"
What they were answering
Imaginary-Play-7804 · 2 points
That is for freshly dried plant or fresh fresh plant? With water loss that would get few percent up or is there loss? Would really like to find more info, only info I found on NCBII was saying about 3% average.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
We tested dried plant. Fresh plant will have even less, due to the water content. It's also likely to vary wildly from plant to plant and from region to region. I've started to trust shit I read online and in studies even less than I already did, due to constantly getting totally different results in the lab when we actually try to replicate the data. Sometimes you go down rabbit holes with research papers, and it's like a Russian nesting doll of citations. One paper makes a claim, and cites another paper for that claim. I go find that paper, and that one is citing a different paper for the claim. Then I go get that study, and I find out that claim isn't even anywhere in the paper... So you have data that just get regurgitated from research paper to research paper in citations, and you follow the trail of citations back to like a 1980s study that doesn't even have the claim being perpetuated. We run into this a lot when we are developing new products, too. We ask our extraction partners to make a standardized extract of a specific plant to a specific compound, but we have to switch plants because the real world content doesn't match what we expected on paper.