The health benefits of plant-based supplements have been known for centuries. In fact, the use of herbal medicines is said to date as far back as 60,000 years  – long before the advent of modern medicine.

Used in cuisines all over the world, some of the most well-known herbs and fruits are blessed with natural herbal extract compounds that are advantageous to human wellbeing. Specifically, these are packed with bioactive compounds, such as polyphenols, which are linked to antioxidant activity in the human body.

The question is, then, what’s the point of liquid herbal extracts – like Comvita’s Olive Leaf Extract which is known for its antioxidant effects?

While eating fresh fruits and vegetables and adding herbs to your food are an important part of a healthy, well-rounded diet, here are some of the top benefits of supplementing your diet with liquid extracts.

POTENCY

Plants in their raw form don’t contain the same concentration of beneficial antioxidant compounds as you’ll find in liquid herbal extract – in fact, it’s vastly different..

So, consuming liquid herbal extract in addition to a healthy balanced diet is a convenient way to give your a top up of beneficial antioxidants without trying to eat impossible amounts of herbs, fruits and vegetables.

EASY TO CONSUME AND VERSATILE

It’s important to maintain a healthy diet, but it can be tricky to ensure you’re incorporating all of nature’s most precious compounds into an everyday diet.

Olive Leaf Extract can be taken alongside your daily meals to get the benefit of their nutrients and antioxidant compounds. For example, you could add the recommended amount of olive leaf extract to drinks such as water, juice and tea.

For a long time, extraction has long been a popular method for getting the beneficial nutrients and compounds out of plants and herbs. For the most part, this has traditionally been done using hot water to make a ‘tea’.

But while extraction methods have continued to evolve, Comvita has remained dedicated to preserving freshness and natural processes. Comvita Olive Leaf Extract is not extracted with alcohol and uses only freshly picked olive leaves in the extraction process which takes place onsite at our Queensland olive tree grove. You can find out more about our Olive Leaf Extract here.

Cosmetics are products designed to cleanse, protect and change the appearance of external parts of our bodies, like food additives in food industry. The key cosmetic ingredients present in most cosmetics include water, emulsifiers, preservatives, thickeners, moisturisers, colours and fragrances. Ingredients can be naturally occurring or artificial, but any potential impact on our health depends mainly on the chemical compounds they are made of. The doses of potentially dangerous chemicals found in cosmetics are considered too small to pose a risk to human health.

Natural products, such as natural fruit and vegerable powder, used to be sold primarily in health food stores and farmers markets with labels decorated with pictures of leaves. It was a very specific niche and not taken seriously by the beauty industry. But now sleek new brands positioning themselves as “cleaner” alternatives to the mainstream are exploding.

Daniela Ciocan — the marketing director at Cosmoprof North America, an entity that hosts a large expo where brands can display their wares in hopes of landing retail placement — says that thanks to retailer and customer demand, this year the organization doubled the amount of space it dedicated to new “clean” brands at the 2017 convention.

In the past 12 months, so-called natural brands like Tata Harper and Jessica Alba’s Honest Company products with natural color have made up about a quarter of all higher-end skin care sales, according to the NPD Group. The category is growing at a faster rate than last year.

“We’re absolutely inundated,” says Annie Jackson, a co-founder of Credo, which was dubbed the “Sephora of clean beauty” when it launched in 2015. It currently has eight stores in the US and a robust online business, where it sells about 115 brands. Credo receives about 200 new products a month from brands hoping to sell there.

And it has a competitor. Follain, which opened before Credo in 2013 as a local shop in Boston, is growing rapidly. It currently has five stores, will open two more in October and expects to have 10 by the end of 2019. Its growth rate is up more than 200 percent in 2018.

In the meantime, customer demand means mainstream companies and retailers are giving more lip service to the concept of clean beauty. In 2017, Target bumped up its natural beauty offerings. CVS announced it was removing parabens and other ingredients from 600 of its house-branded products by the end of 2019. Brands regularly remove parabens and sulfates and the like, sometimes quietly and sometimes with great fanfare.

Sephora launched its “Clean at Sephora” initiative in May, citing in-house research that revealed that 54 percent of its skin care shoppers think it’s important that their products “have a point of view on clean” and looking to shop brands that are “grounded in a ‘free of’ ingredient perspective,” according to Cindy Deily, the senior director of skin care merchandising at Sephora, though she did not say free of what. Sephora received some criticism that its clean standards weren’t as rigorous as they could be, but Deily says the “no” list is still evolving.