Supplement Facts - RBC Life

The Healing Powers of Aloe Vera
Three decades ago, RBC’s founder and CEO, Clinton Howard began hearing stories about a
tropical plant called “aloe”, the juice of which had amazing benefits. It had been used by people
in warm climates and by early physicians hundreds of years before Hippocrates included it in his
medications. It was taken internally to improve digestion, or applied topically to soothe sunburn,
cuts, scrapes, itches, insect bites, or to moisturize dry skin. It was listed among the medical
supplies of explorers like Columbus, and warriors like Alexander The Great who grew his aloe on
an Island near East Africa.
Curious about it, he pointed to an aloe plant in a nursery
and asked a sales clerk, “What is that plant?” She answered,
“That is the medicine plant!” He asked a pharmacist for an
aloe product, but was told there were none on the market.
Now wait! This didn't add up -- Pharmaceutical companies
spend billions searching for new drugs, and here is a known
“medicine plant”. It was clear to this medical research
pioneer that the benefits of aloe vera must be determined
and made available to the public. Someone needed to
conduct a scientific study of the chemistry, safety, and efficacy of aloe, have it approved, introduce it
to the market, and make it available to those who need it.
Clinton Howard decided to take aloe out of the realm of folk medicine. He founded Carrington
Laboratories, built a research laboratory and recruited a team of five scientists who began the most
comprehensive scientific study of aloe vera ever conducted. Four years and more than twenty million
dollars later, they knew how to grow, process, and stabilize aloe. They demonstrated its safety and
biological activity in humans and animals, and discovered its most active ingredients.
They learned that the large thick aloe leaf has two useful parts:
1) A yellow sap just beneath the skin that was used as a laxative, and
2) the melon-like fillet that contains aloe gel used topically or cut
into small portions and eaten as a health supplement. They began
removing the skin by hand with a knife, and having no interest in the
laxative effect, washed off all yellow sap to leave only a clean fillet.
Secondly, this team of aloe researchers learned that aloe gel has
many ingredients. The most active is a long chain sugar, or
polysaccharide, that has incredible benefits for the immune system.
They also learned that the aloe extract stimulates the reproduction of fibroblast cells by approximately
300%. These are early-stage cells that form and repair connective tissue. The aloe gel was approved
as a hydrogel applied to skin wounds. On the basis of its immune-system activity, the polysaccharide
W H Y S U P P L E M E N T A T I O N I S V I T A L T O Y O U R G O O D H E A L T H 23