When you pick up a bottle of a dietary supplement that may contribute to your health and well-being, you are joining legions of  people that are exercising personal control over their own regimens. Herbal preparations are prescribed as ethical drugs in some countries: German doctors prescribe saw palmetto for prostate problems and St. John’s Wort as a mood elevator. Lack of control over the actual amount of the active phytochemical present in unextracted plant material is a continuing problem. Unless your recently-purchased bottle includes a certification of analysis, you won’t know the amount or consistency of the dose that you’re taking. Because herbal preparations do not come under drug preparation laws (as long as they are sold as dietary products), the makers do not have to provide certification. The marketplace has exerted its pressure, though, and some big ethical drug-makers are now offering standardized herbals. Until now, there has been no effective screening instruments for herbal packers. The new PhytoScan NIR analyzers from LT Industries have changed all that, however. Using either the PhtyoScan-B version for bulk plant material or the –L version for extracts, the same NIR technology that so ably supports the ethical drug manufacturing industry is now available to herbal packers and suppliers.

PhytoScan analyzers are the first and finest constituent screeners designed specifically for the needs of the nutraceutical and functional food industries. Requiring little or no sample preparation and only minutes of elapsed time, PhytoScan systems can provide moisture determination, relative concentrations of active components and best of all, lot-to-lot consistency. The NIR spectrometer at the heart of the PhytoScan system has proved its worth for years throughout the food and pharmaceutical industries - determining dextrose equivalance, moisture in chopped flora, concentrations of vitamin intermediates during synthesis - simply and easily.

New PhytoScan™ instrument family helps standardize nutraceutical activities.

Special points of interest:

	Low acquisition cost
	Simple, rugged software
	Sampler is included
	Calibrate once, test frequently
	Field-proven

	Near-Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy provides both chemical and physical information.
	Calibration always takes your standard lab values into account.SM optics.
	Standardize once and run for many months for the same product.
	The system can measure through many unopened container walls — even glass jars.
	The test is both fast and non-destructive, does not require reagents.
	Thousands of NIR units are in use throughout the pharmaceutical industry.
	Both acquisition and operating costs are low.