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Gas Chromatography
Every
one of Amrita’s essential oils has been verified for purity and
authenticity by gas chromatography (GC). After 14 years of analyzing
essential oils, Christoph emphatically states, "An in-house
gas-chromatographic laboratory is an absolute necessity to ensure the
purity and effectiveness of essential oils and essential oil products."
Testing
every essential oil batch when it arrives, as we do at Amrita, would be
cost-prohibitive for an essential oil company that has to rely on an
outside GC lab. And spot-testing, or simply relying on vendors’
information, is not sufficient to ensure the purity of the oils. The
detection of "nature-identical compounds" of synthetic origin often
requires chiral column analysis.
Every Essential Oil Batch Must Be Screened by Gas-Chromatography
Gas-chromatographic
screening of every batch is necessary, therefore, to ensure that the
oil has not been cut with alcohol or any other solvent and does not
include so-called “nature identical” laboratory-produced compounds. It
verifies not only that the oil is 100% natural but also that it is
distilled from the correct botanical species, subspecies and chemotype.
Amrita
selects only properly distilled, unadulterated, 100% botanical
essential oils. We do not accept oils that have been rectified,
peroxidized, decolorized, deterpenized, denatured, reconstituted or
mixed with other essential oils, lipids, alcohol or other chemical
compounds.
There is only one exception: One of Amrita’s four eucalyptus
oils (Eucalyptus globulus, No. 3422) is moderately rectified. We found
that a moderate rectification of Eucalyptus globulus still offers the
desired results; however, we also offer the completely unrectified
oil. Unfortunately, more than 99% of all eucalyptus oils on the market
today are heavily rectified and therefore therapeutically useless.
GC Testing Is the Only Way to Determine an Oil's Therapeutic Value
Furthermore,
Amrita uses gas chromatography to verify that every oil contains the
necessary chemical profile to ensure its therapeutic usefulness.
Sometimes GC testing is the only way to determine the therapeutic value
of an essential oil.
For example,
we do not accept German chamomile oil of the alpha bisabolol oxide
chemotype. Although this is the most common variety of German
chamomile, from a therapeutic point of view it is fairly useless
because it lacks anti-inflammatory properties. In
order for chamomile oil to be anti-inflammatory, it needs to contain a
significant amount of alpha bisalolol (rather than the alpha bisabolol oxide type).
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