Botanically referred to as Prunella vulgaris, Self-Heal is a plant with a long history in traditional herbal medicine throughout Europe and Asia, and is frequently mentioned in the context of folk and traditional medicine, dating back centuries. Today it's available as a capsule found on supplement shelves and online retailers, typically followed by a succinct and boring term, "dried herb. That term means more questions than answers to many consumers. What did he dry in comparison with? Is it the entire plant or a species? Does it make any difference as far as the strength and effectiveness of the capsule? The answers are not necessarily obvious: a raw dried herb, versus a standardized extract, can be a difference of many degrees, and the labels of supplements don't often tell you in very clear terms. But before you can be a more educated supplement consumer, it's important to know what dried herb really means on the label — and where it really comes from to begin with.
The information provided in this article is for educational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Always consult a licensed health care professional before beginning to use any new supplement especially while pregnant, nursing, or if you are on a health regimen or using other medications.
Raw Powder vs. Standardized Extract: What's on the Supplement Label?
When a Self-Heal supplement label mentions “dried herb”, it is referring to a particular fairly simple manufacturing process. The aerial parts of the plant (leaves, stems and flowering tops) are harvested and subjected to controlled air drying or low heat dehydration to dry the plant material without degrading it by exposing it to too much heat, where the majority of the compounds traditionally used in the plant are concentrated. After drying, plant material is milled into a powder. This powder is encapsulated directly, without any more chemical processing. Basically, by opening a capsule with this label you will be taking a dose of the actual ground-up plant material, rather than an isolated or concentrated version of the plant.
This is significant because it is in stark opposition to how an extract is made. A standardized or concentrated extract begins with the same raw plant material and then instead of drying and grinding, the manufacturer will use a solvent, most commonly water and/or ethanol, to extract certain compounds from the plant matter and concentrate them. The plant fiber and bulk material are normally discarded and a more concentrated and potent material remains of whatever compounds the manufacturer is looking for. A "10:1 extract" for instance, would usually mean that it took about ten parts of raw plant material to make 1 part of the concentrated extract.
When it comes down to the consumer, there's a compromise. Whole dried herb captures what herbalists term as the natural compound synergy in the plant—the full range of compounds the plant produces in tandem, with one or two compounds being isolated and the rest discarded. The case for whole-herb preparations is that there might be a different interaction between the different components, because that interaction is how it was in the plant to start with. The compromise is concentration: gram for gram, a dried whole herb capsule, is just not as effective in terms of any one compound as a standardized extract that is designed for a known amount of any given compound. There's no right or wrong — they are two philosophies of herb manufacturing and a label that states dried herb is telling you what you are getting — the first kind.
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Clearly, this is the kind of work that wellness educators and supplement reviewers should be doing in explaining the difference in manufacturing and the platform in which it's done is just as important as the writing itself!
- A long form botanical page requires a quiet page layout. The distinction between raw herb powder and standardized extracts is so technical that it takes some time to understand, and having a lot of visual clutter on a page and ads popping up or changing location throughout the page definitely doesn't help.
- Most wellness research takes place on a phone, so it's critical to have a mobile-first design. Many supplement consumers look up information on their phone, sometimes right as they are in the middle of a purchasing decision in the store or while they are comparing products online, so a design that doesn't look great on a smaller screen is a hindrance to someone who is trying to make an educated decision at the time.
- Lightweight templates minimize the amount of layout shifting which safeguards readability of technical detail. Well-coded frameworks, such as the Piki Templates (www.pikitemplates.com), will keep the number of unexpected content jumps that occur when ads or scripts load slowly to a minimum, especially when a reader is in the middle of a sentence in a dosage or processing explanation.
- Structures like ‘Silo' and ‘Sprinkle' are SEO-friendly and allow accurate information to rise above lower quality information. Page speed and structure are among the factors search engines consider, and well-structured health information should outrank information that is poorly written and lacks research—unless the technical basis doesn't allow it.
- Sustainable publishing without sacrificing clearness – Adsense-friendly templates. Monetization that doesn't get in the way of the reading experience is great for educational health content, and a well-designed ad-friendly design puts the revenue components where they don't detract from the content, but where they still have an impact.
- The speed at which pages load will directly impact whether readers will even get to the end of the article. If it takes too long to load, it's not going to be useful to the reader even if it is a botanical breakdown explaining manufacturing processes; it's not going to get many visitors to the end of it.
The need for speedy and dependable infrastructure for educational traffic.
Wellness and herbal sites can experience a surge of traffic in a short period of time: a viral social media post about a herb, a new study in the mainstream media or a seasonal uptick in traffic during cold and flu season can send a wave of new visitors to a site on these topics within a short period of time. Self-Heal and other traditional herbs can suddenly become a hot topic and a website that is not set up for that may lose out on most of the visibility it is gaining around that very subject when it is most needed due to poor load times or server stress.
A true stable/light site architecture, such as 'Galaxy' theme or any other well-optimized and low overhead blogger template, can easily take this kind of spike of traffic, rather than a heavier design with a lot of plugins. With less server side processes per page load, the site won't slow to a crawl when 10 users are there compared with 1000 or 10,000 users, thereby keeping the hosting costs down and making pages load consistently regardless of how many users are on the site at any given time. That stability means that for independent wellness educators, they can actually deliver a sudden influx of attention to a clean, well-formatted page of information rather than a half loaded page, and leaves their content properly paced and text legible for monetisation without compromising the educational value of the content.
Cultivating the next generation of health-conscious consumers
One of the lesser-known facts of label reading, but one that's still important, is that when you see dried herb, that is what you're getting, not a super-concentrated extract. Supplement labels are not self-explanatory and it's up to educators, reviewers, herbalists to take the time to explain what each method means, and what it can and cannot achieve. For that to be done well, one needs to write in such a way that does not insult the intelligence of the reader, and a platform clean and fast enough to let the writing actually be read -- start to finish -- on whatever device the reader is holding.
