Bio-Foods, Ltd.

 

Are Plant Extracts of Vitamins Commercially Viable?

Bio-Foods has produced Whole Food Yeast Fermented Vitamins for over 26 years.  Some people ask why we don't extract vitamins from plants instead of using yeast fermentation to achieve a natural food form.  They mention vitamin C from Amla fruit, vitamin D-3 from Lichens, and others. They even mention vitamin A from fish liver oil (a fish extract).

Why are such extracts so impractical?  Let’s take vitamin C from Amla as an example.      

About 225 KG of fresh Amla fruit contains 1 KG of vitamin C.  That means for 500 KG of vitamin C you would need 248,017 pounds of Amla.  

In order to extract vitamin C the fruit must first be ground up.  Plants need enzymes to oxidize carbohydrates for energy. Upon grinding, those enzymes are released causing the plant to lose control resulting in willy-nilly oxidation of every carbohydrate including vitamin C (a monosaccharide).  How much vitamin C would remain active is a question.

After grinding comes water extraction.  How much of the surviving vitamin C is extracted from the huge mass (which then needs to be discarded) is the next question.

Then comes the drying process.  Depending on the level and duration of heat that is applied to dry the extract into a powder, some further percent of vitamin C will be destroyed.  

Therefore, the amount of Amla required to yield each KG of vitamin C could be much greater than 225 KG.  The cost would be prohibitive, and how different (if at all) would the Amla vitamin C be from commercially available ascorbic acid USP?  

For marketing purposes it might be easy to simply spike ascorbic acid USP with a little dried Amla powder, but that would be misleading if not disclosed.  

The situation is similar for Lichens, Sago Palm, Acerola Cherries, Rose Hips, fish livers, etc.  That’s why Bio-Foods utilizes living nutritional yeast to provide vitamins as integral parts of a whole food matrix.