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Talk with your pediatrician

Although there are ways to limit the amount of potentially harmful food additives in your family's diet, stronger federal food safety requirements will help keep all children healthy.

If you're concerned about food additives, talk with your pediatrician. Your regional Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU) have staff who can also talk with parents about concerns over environmental toxins.

There are many different methods used to produce natural plant extract powder. Durning an extraction process a solvent is used to draw out the plant extracts, common solvents utilised are water or alcohol. Once the desired compounds are extracted the solvent is then removed. The plant extraction method used depends on whether specific compounds of the plant are desired to be extracted or the full range of plant compounds. Here we take a close look at the different methods of extraction.

1. LIPOPHILIC EXTACTION // Lipophilic are oil loving (fat soluble) and therefore soluble in oil. Macerated or Infused oil are Lipophilic extracts. This includes fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K), carotenoids, bisabolol and other lipophilic active ingredients. Note: Vitamin C is an extremely sensitive hydrophilic vitamin and therefore it is NOT present in plant oils, however some plant oils exhibit Vitamin C behaviours, research, I am sure one day may explain these 'effects'.

HOW IT WORKS // Plant material is added to a carrier oil. Maceration is performed as cold or warm-cold. Usually the procedure takes a few days to several weeks and the plant material is renewed several times during the maceration period. Heat or sun are applied as sources of energy.
Ingredient Example // St Johns Wort Infused Oil

2. SUPERCRITICAL EXTRACTION (CO2) //Supercritical extraction uses CO2 (Carbon dioxide - an oxygen-free process) instead of organic solvents.

HOW IT WORKS // At a temperature and pressure above its critical point, a molecule will become a supercritical fluid, which is not quite a gas, but not quite a liquid. Supercritical fluids can be used under high pressure to extract a full range of phytochemical types. CO2 has a high diffusion rate that can penetrate the material quickier than liquids. It is a pure substance found in nature and is, thus, easily removed from the final extract without leaving any residue.

Among its advantages, supercritical CO2 extraction has the flexibility to extract specific compounds, and it operates at temperatures lower than expeller press and organic solvent methods. It also involves no oxygen, thus better preserving the extracted compounds.

CO2 extraction delivers the superior active properties of the plant without the use of any chemical solvents or the production of residues & impurities or issues with rancidity. Supercritical CO2 extraction is not ideal for all ingredients, this method is only applicable to materials that are lipid soluble.

A natural instant fruit juice powder is a powder made from the juice of fresh fruit and then dried into a fine powder. Fruit juice powders are basically concentrated fruit juice dehydrated by spray-drying method. Its moisture content is 1%-3%. The spray drying process is considered a conventional method to convert fruit juices to powder form. It can be used in drinks, dressings, marinades, desserts, smoothies etc. One must not get confused between fruit powder and fruit juice powder as the two are totally different. Powders are made from drying the whole fruits while fruit juice powders are made from drying the pure juice.

What is an API?

An API is defined as a specification of possible interactions with a software component. What does that mean, exactly? Well, imagine that a car was a software component. Its API would include information about what it can do—accelerate, brake, turn on the radio, etc. It would also include information about how you could make it do those things. For instance, to accelerate, you put your foot on the gas pedal and push.

The API doesn’t have to explain what happens inside the engine when you put your foot on the accelerator. That’s why, if you learned to drive a car with an internal combustion engine, you can get behind the wheel of an electric car without having to learn a whole new set of skills. The what and how information come together in the API definition, which is abstract and separate from the car itself.

One thing to keep in mind is that the name of some APIs is often used to refer to both the specification of the interactions and to the actual software component you interact with. The phrase “Twitter API,” for example, not only refers to the set of rules for programmatically interacting with Twitter, but is generally understood to mean the thing you interact with, as in “We’re doing analysis on the tweets we got from the Twitter API.”