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By Serge Kreutz (2011)
If you see a tongkat ali vendor who promotes his tongkat ali extract with the phrases "pharmaceutical grade" and "HPLC", then you are encountering an attempt to scam you out of some of your money.
Why?
Because you are fed bullshit information, in the hope that you are easily impressed by some scientific-sounding vocabulary.
There is no "pharmaceutical grade" tongkat ali or tongkat ali extract.
Just as there is no pharmaceutical grade wholewheat bread.
And no pharmaceutical grade Bordeaux wine.
Sure, there are different qualities of wholewheat bread and Bordeaux wine.
But it is nonsense to use terms like "pharmaceutical grade" to differentiate qualities of bread and wine.
Tongkat ali extract is a processed natural product, just like bread and wine.
Granted, it does not taste as good. On the other hand, its effects on human physiology are more beneficial than those of the alcoholic Bordeaux.
But just like the Bordeaux or pumpernickel, or tea or coffee, tongkat ali extract is a compound of many different chemical substances.
There are a number of chemicals that are usually present, but their exact ratio will vary from loaf to loaf, and from bottle to bottle.
If you see a winery that advertises "pharmaceutical grade Bordeaux", this is either an attempt to smartass you with lofty terminology, or something more sinister. Does your winery play tricks with chemicals? Like they once did in Austria, rounding the taste of low-quality grape juice with car radiator coolant.
If you come across a website that offers "pharmaceutical grade tongkat ali extract", you know that THEY think that YOU are an idiot who can be taken for a ride.
"Pharmaceutical grade" is a term that can, for example, be applied to sildenafil citrate, the active ingredient of Viagra. What you buy as genuine Viagra is indeed pharmaceutical-grade sildenafil citrate.
Apart from pharmaceutical grade, there also is "lab grade". This would be used in LD-50 studies on mice.
And then, there is "reagent grade" which is even lower on the quality scale. Reagent-grade chemicals are used as pass-through substances in the production of other chemicals. For example, reagent-grade sildenafil citrate could, theoretically, be used in the production of sildenafil phosphate.
Now how about "HPLC", another scientific term of tongkat ali spammers who take potential customers for a ride?
HPLC stands for "High-Performance Liquid Chromatography". This is a technology used to check compositions of mixtures of chemicals.
The technology is based on the fact that solutions of different chemicals display a different pattern in being absorbed.
HPLC can be used to quantify constituents of tongkat ali extract, such as eurycomanone or eurycomanole.
But claiming that HPLC was used to manufacture pharmaceutical grade tongkat ali extract is fooling readers.
The HPLC technology would be put into use if a company were to manufacture eurycomanone as a single, separated chemical, and this could indeed be lab grade or pharmaceutical grade.
HOWEVER.....
A company who were to release pharmaceutical grade eurycomanone to the public would have to be a licensed pharmaceutical company, and the pharmaceutical product would have to undergo vigorous testing, just as sildenafil citrate had to.
This has not happened, and is unlikely to happen any time soon.
So, what we have now, and should be happy with, is naturally manufactured tongkat ali extract, at various extraction ratios, but containing all the ingredients that are present in tongkat ali root, minus the fiber.
Such extract has been consumed by humans for hundreds of years in Southeast Asia for its positive impact on male sexuality, and such extract has been used in hundreds of studies.
That some vendors attempt to chemicalize and pharmaceuticalize tongkat ali extract is nothing but a sales trick of dubious herbs sources who, nevertheless, are experts in spamming the Internet.
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Copyright Serge Kreutz