I had a discussion with a supplier on the subject of powders vs extracts and while I do respect the role of extracts in providing large quantities of a given nutrient that is often more advantageous in remediation of acute conditions, there is another side to the story in general purpose nutrition that I thought you may care to read.
G’day Annie,
Thank you for the lovely acknowledgement!
In my top products I mix over 200 ingredients of the over 400 I stock.
That means in a 6.45 kg batch for a great many of those ingredients I use 10 grams or less.
To use a 10:1 extract means for comparison of the specific nutrient in that extract I need to use only 1 gram in a 6.45 kilo mix.
A 6.45 kilo mix yields 16 x 400 gram tubs, each of 40 serves.
That is 640 individual 10 gram serves per batch.
So there is a strong chance that, despite my best mixing efforts, most individual serves would contain zero of the extract.
The other point I take into consideration is that we presently know so little about our primary food sources that if we use an extract rather than the raw plant we are most likely missing out on a great many nutrients we as yet know nothing about. For instance do you know there are over 40,000 phytochemicals in foods? Of which we know something about 10,00 of them! So just there that means there is more we do not know than there is that we do know!
Then there is the synergistic effect of nutrient combinations. For instance antioxidants taken in combination have a multiplicative beneficial effect on the body.
And lastly, there is the extraction process itself. That may leave chemical residues in the extract.
Hope that helps.