Aloe vera, Aloeride, and Climate Change: What are they?

Aloe vera may be an Ugly Betty among all plants but it has a 4,000 plus year track record of being hugely valued for improving both beauty and health. The earliest recorded pharmaceutical use dates back to 2100 BC (Sumeria/Babylon). Also Hieroglyphic inscriptions of aloe were found in the tomb of an Egyptian Court physician which dated to 4100 BC.

The queens of history Cleopatra and Nefertiti who were both renowned for their stunning beauty used aloe vera to maintain their health and beauty. Aloe vera today is undeniably still the popular for the same reasons it was valued for throughout the ages.

The Aloe vera plant may look like a cactus but it is actually a succulent. It is a member of the Liliacae family where the common crops like onion, garlic, asparagus, lily and the tulip belongs to. One of aloe vera’s popular nick names is ‘lily of the desert’ because that is where it grows naturally. This xeroids plant can survive long periods of droughts because of its ability to retain and preserve large quantities of water.

The amazing aloe property, being able to survive such a harsh environment, has interesting implications for you. When for instance an aloe leaf gets damaged it instantaneously repairs this damage thereby avoiding loss of water. Failure to quickly repair the injury site would result in evaporation of its precious reservoir and may jeopardize the plant’s health or survival. When you ingest Aloeride®, such tissue repair and other powerful aloe vera properties are transferred to you

Currently, there are over 350 varieties of aloe vera. However, only 4 contain significant healing properties. The most nutrient dense of these is aloe vera barbadensis miller, the plant used to make Aloeride®. Aloe vera is a complex, interacting mixture of some 300 constituents including beta-linked polysaccharides, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, lignins, saponins and anthraquinones.

The challenge in processing aloe vera is how to extract all of these synergistic molecules without damaging them or without significantly altering their ratios to one another. Next all these synergistic molecules must be delivered in meaningful quantities for only then can the many properties attributed to aloe vera manifest themselves. The Aloeride processors chose to grow the best and process in the cleverest possible way and as a result Aloeride® emerges as the top flight aloe vera product in multiple, independent laboratory tests.

With a nick name like ‘lily of the desert’ its not surprising to learn that aloe vera cannot tolerate frost. Its water content freezes at 28° Fahrenheit (minus 2°Celcius) causing the plant to die. Consequently most commercial growth of aloe vera happens south of the Equator. North of the Equator commercial growth still is precarious, aloe growers in the ‘dust bowl’ of southern Spain got clobbered when in February 2005 temperatures fell to minus 10° in Madrid and minus 20° in Aragon. But also south of the Equator the climate is changing, until recently Australia was a large producer of aloe vera like it was of wheat, cotton lint, wine grapes and rice. Their prolonged droughts caused a drop in wheat production by over 58% which made wheat prices surge to a 10-year high, these drought also affected Australia’s aloe vera production where one company alone converted some 7,000 tonnes of aloe vera leaf into around three million litres of gel each year.

An aloe vera plant needs 150mL water a month as otherwise it dies. Plants that do survive the drought generate more aloin and emodin, resulting in their gel having an even more bitter taste and stronger odour than usual. It is what dehydrated aloe does for self-preservation because emodin and aloin have anti-inflammatory, bactericidal, virucidal, fungicidal and anti-cancer effect. These hydroxyanthraquinone compounds become life savers as the dehydrated plant fights cell disorganisation and bacteria, viruses or fungi that prey on it.

However, what is good for a distressed aloe vera plant isn’t necessarily good for you. In the lower gastrointestinal tract barbaloin molecules are hydrolysed to create aloe emodin which acts as a laxative by increasing water retention and mucus secretion in the large intestine. Aloe vera crop surviving droughts may come with a sting in its tail that causes mayhem in sensitive digestive tracts.

In order to achieve product consistency in a changing climate, Aloeride manufacturers perform routine laboratory tests on trial processed harvests and base their purchases on those outcomes. The effect of climate change reaches aloe vera crops worldwide and to date Aloeride® has needed to make two rejections because of their very exacting Quality Control.

Climate change certainly makes optimal harvesting more challenging than it has been in the past decades but the customer feedback shows that keeping to their unique standards makes an appreciable difference to customer’s quality of life. An Ugly Betty aloe vera may be, but in Aloeride® it waves its magic wand supremely.