Quick Answer
A herb is the dried, ground plant part itself; an extract is what you get after pulling soluble compounds out of that plant with water, alcohol or another solvent and concentrating the result. The two can share a name on a panel while differing enormously in strength. Understanding extraction ratios and standardisation is the single most useful skill for reading a supplement panel accurately.
What Extraction Actually Removes
Extraction is a sorting process. A solvent is chosen for what it will dissolve, the plant material is soaked or percolated, and the liquid carrying the dissolved compounds is separated off and dried. Water pulls out sugars, tannins and many polyphenols. Alcohol pulls out resins and some oils. Whatever the solvent leaves behind, mostly fibre and structural material, is discarded.
This is why the solvent choice is part of the ingredient's identity. A water extract and an alcohol extract of the same leaf are chemically different products, with different compounds present in different proportions. When research on a botanical looks contradictory, differing extraction methods are often part of the explanation, because the studies were not testing quite the same substance.
Ratios, Standardisation And Reading A Panel
Two notations do most of the work on a panel. An extraction ratio such as ten to one means ten parts of raw plant produced one part of finished extract, so the concentration of soluble compounds is roughly tenfold. Standardisation goes further, guaranteeing a stated proportion of one named marker compound, which makes batches consistent in a way raw herb never is.
Neither notation is automatically better. Standardisation buys reproducibility but narrows the product to whichever marker was chosen, which may not be the only active constituent. Whole herb keeps the full mixture but varies with soil, season and harvest. What matters is that the two are not interchangeable, and a panel listing one while research examined the other is telling you less than it appears.
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