How Aloe Gel and Its Acemannan-Rich Polysaccharides May Help Nutrients Reach Their Destination Click Play to begin
Let’s begin with a question that almost nobody asks.
When you swallow a nutritional supplement…what has to happen before it can actually benefit your body?
The answer turns out to be far more fascinating than most people realize. But what might be just as fascinating is a natural nutritional compound that could take your body to yet another level of benefit.
So, the given here is that before a nutrient can do its job, it first has to reach the place where it can actually be used by the body.
We will examine a fascinating scientific review that asks an important question:
Could Aloe vera gel—and more specifically its Acemannan-rich polysaccharides—help improve the delivery of nutrients and other compounds across the body’s natural biological barriers?
This isn’t a single experiment or stand-alone study. It’s a review that brings together evidence from multiple scientific studies, allowing us to step back and see the bigger picture that’s beginning to emerge.
With yet another important question on the table for discussion. We’re not on a quest merely to find answers. We’re on a quest to develop understanding—because understanding doesn’t end the conversation, it inspires the next question and expands the explorations. That’s why we dig deeper and reach wider.
Why Absorption Matters
Before a nutrient can benefit your body, it first has to reach the place where your body can actually use it.
That may sound obvious, but it’s one of the greatest challenges in both nutritional and pharmaceutical science.
No matter how effective a nutrient may be, it can only work if the body can absorb it and deliver it to where it’s needed.
That’s why this review focuses on what researchers call drug delivery.
Don’t let the word drug throw you off. Drug delivery simply refers to the science of helping a substance travel from the product… into the body… and ultimately to the place where it can do its work.
Those same principles apply whether we’re talking about prescription medications, vitamins, nutritional supplements, or other bioactive compounds.
That brings us to today’s Scientific review.
Its title is: “Aloe vera Gel and Whole Leaf Extract: Functional and Versatile Excipients for Drug Delivery.” Published in 2019
The first unfamiliar word is excipient. Most people have never heard that word.
An excipient is simply an ingredient that helps another ingredient do its job.
Think of it this way.
You are shipping a priceless violin across the country, but you would not simply tape a mailing label onto the violin. Of course not
Instead, you place the violin inside a carefully designed protective case for its eventual safe delivery
The violin is like the active ingredient. The protective case is like the excipient.
Its purpose is to help the valuable cargo arrive safely at its destination.
However, and this is one of my pet peeves, this is not a perfect analogy. Researchers are now talking about something called a functional excipient.
A functional excipient doesn’t merely occupy space.
It actually contributes something useful. It may help protect the active ingredient It may also do other things like improve stability and absorption. It may even help transport that ingredient across the body’s natural biological barriers.
And that’s exactly why Aloe vera gel and its accompanying polysaccharides, yep, that would put Acemannan in the mix, has attracted so much scientific attention.
The question has become, “Could Aloe gel itself help other compounds reach the places where they need to go?”
This question has generated a remarkable amount of scientific investigation over the past three decades. We have at least four other video presentations at this website on this very subject at the links provided below.
We will soon talk about important details but let’s start with this first graphic as a way to get a feel for the big picture.
Scientists don’t usually discover something one afternoon, publish a paper, and declare the matter settled forever.
Instead…
confidence grows.
It grows one study at a time. One observation and one experiment at a time.
Those individual pieces begin fitting together into a larger picture.
That’s exactly what this pyramid is designed to illustrate.
You’ll notice the widest part at the bottom of the pyramid is labeled Mechanism, which simply means
How does something work?
Not…Does it work?
But…How might it work?
Scientists first want to understand what is happening inside the body.
What biological process is taking place?
What exactly explains what they are observing?
The next level of the pyramid is Cell Studies.
Once scientists have an idea about a possible mechanism…they often begin testing individual cells.
These studies usually happen in the laboratory where cells are carefully grown under controlled conditions.
In this context researchers isolate one question at a time. This allows them to deal with variables that exist and gather more data.
Cell studies help answer questions like:
“Does this compound appear to affect particular cells?”
“Can we observe a biological response?”
“Does the proposed mechanism actually occur?”
Cell studies are powerful…but they are only one step in the process.
Cells in a laboratory are much simpler than an entire human body.
Next we move to Animal Studies.
At this level researchers ask a bigger question. What happens inside an entire living organism?
Animals have complete digestive systems…blood circulation…immune systems…metabolism…and organs that interact with one another.
That makes these studies much more complex.
Sometimes the promising results seen in individual cells back at the laboratory continue in this phase in the animal specimens.
Sometimes they don’t.
That’s why this step is important.
Science is constantly testing itself.
Now we come to Human Studies.
This is where everyone would like to begin.
But good science driven by a strong ethic usually doesn’t unless the highest levels of safety can be guaranteed.
However, by the time researchers begin studying people…they’ve already learned a great deal from mechanisms…and cells…and animals.
Human studies tell us something no laboratory experiment can fully answer.
What actually happens in real people?
And this is where ages, genetics, lifestyles, health conditions are taken into account
Human studies provide some of the strongest evidence we can gather.
But even here…one study is rarely enough. Scientists look for consistency.
Can other researchers observe similar results? Can the findings be repeated?
Finally…
at the very top of the pyramid…
we arrive at Scientific Reviews.
The paper we’re discussing today belongs here. A scientific review is not one more experiment.
It’s something much larger. This is a collection of many studies…
They are compared and evaluated and the question is asked,
“What overall picture is beginning to emerge?”
What picture are all the scientific puzzle pieces beginning to form?
A scientific review helps us see the picture those pieces are forming.
And that’s what’s happening here. It gathers multiple research…across other scientific disciplines…and asks whether a consistent pattern is beginning to emerge regarding Aloe vera gel and its ability to help deliver nutrients more effectively.
In a scientific review we’re no longer looking at isolated observations.
We’re beginning to see a coherent body of evidence.
And now…let’s examine some of the details that have attracted so much scientific attention.
Starting with this study including in the review, Intestinal Drug Transport Enhancement by Aloe Vera. Published in 2009
To begin our understanding
Let’s Imagine your small intestine.
Most people think of it as a long tube where food passes through.
That’s true.
But what many people don’t realize is that the inside surface of your intestine is actually one of the body’s most carefully guarded barriers.
Its job isn’t simply to absorb everything that comes along. Its job is to guard what gets in…and what stays out. If the barrier were too tight…important nutrients might never reach your bloodstream.
If it was permanently too loose… undesirable substances could enter just as easily.
The body has to maintain an extraordinary balance. And one of the ways it does that is through structures called tight junctions.
What are Tight Junctions?
Let’s look at our graphic.
These structures represent an individual intestinal section of cells.
They sit side by side like offensive lineman on a football team standing shoulder to shoulder.
Now look carefully at the tiny spaces where those cells meet.
Those connection points are called tight junctions.
Think of them as tiny adjustable doorways.
Most of the time…they remain very tightly regulated.
Their purpose is to help determine what can move between neighboring cells.
This is the paracellular pathway.
paracellular simply means:
between the cells.
Not through them… between them.
What Did Scientists Observe?
Could Aloe vera gel, and its Acemannan polysaccharides, somehow influence these tiny gateways?
Not permanently.
Temporarily.
The review explains that researchers repeatedly observed something remarkable.
When Aloe vera gel and Aloe whole-leaf extract were introduced…
these tight junctions appeared to relax temporarily.
That temporary change allowed certain compounds to move more easily between adjacent intestinal cells.
Notice I emphasized the word temporarily.
That’s extremely important.
The researchers were not trying to damage the intestinal barrier. They were investigating whether its permeability—that is, its ability to allow passage—could be safely increased for a short period of time.
Here’s another scientific term.
Is TEER.
It stands for Transepithelial Electrical Resistance.
So why are we talking about electricity all of a sudden when we’re really interested in nutrient absorption?
TEER is a measuring tool.
So just how tightly are those cells connected How do we measure that exactly?
TEER is the means by which we obtain the needed measurement so we can know the answer to that question.
Let’s bring back into focus the tight junctions between neighboring intestinal cells?
When the tight junctions are firmly closed, they resist the movement of tiny charged particles called ions. That produces a high TEER value, indicating a tightly sealed barrier.
If those junctions relax even slightly, the ions move through the spaces between the cells more easily. As a result, the electrical resistance decreases, producing a lower TEER value.
TEER measures just how tightly the intestinal barrier is sealed.
Scientists then combine those TEER measurements with separate experiments that directly measure how much of a nutrient actually crosses that barrier.
Throughout several of the studies summarized in this review, Aloe vera gel and whole-leaf extract produced a temporary reduction in TEER, indicating that the intestinal barrier had become temporarily more permeable and nutrients could more easily pass through. That same temporary reduction in TEER was consistently observed by researchers following exposure to Aloe vera gel and its Acemannan-rich polysaccharides.
Reversible Permeability
Now here’s the part that really caught the researchers’ attention.
After Aloe vera gel and its polysaccharide components were removed…
the TEER measurements gradually returned toward their original values.
In other words…the barrier recovered.
The junctions, the tight junctions, returned to their normal state. There had been no damage or injury in the process.
The review we are studying here specifically highlights this reversibility as one of the reasons Aloe attracted scientific interest.
Why does that matter? Because researchers are not looking for a permanently leaky barrier–that would be classified as a negative side effect, which is a typical dynamic of pharmaceutical drugs.
They’re looking for a delivery system that may temporarily improve transport…and then allow the body to return to its normal healthy protective function with no toxic damage left in its wake.
That distinction is critical.
This information blends easily into what we have made known in other scientific studies at this website that Acemannan is NOT toxic. That is why in this graphic of the before, during, after the impact of aloe polysaccharides on the tight junctions, that the before and after graphic are exactly the same.
And all of this lends easily to the idea of bioavailability.
Bioavailability simply refers to: How much of a nutrient actually becomes available for your body to utilize.
Imagine you take a fish oil supplement you acquired at a membership warehouse club. (That’s where I saw the fish oil.) This is a very popular ingredient among those who want to take care of their health. However, only about 12% of that fish oil is bioavailable. Only 12 parts in 100 of any amount of fish oil you consume actually becomes available for your body to put to good use. That doesn’t mean you should stop taking it. But what if there was a technology that could increase that bioavailability by up to 60 times as much. I happen to know of this kind of technology and in this case it’s not Acemannan. More on that one day soon.
The scientific study that the authors of this review deemed worthy to be folded into their coverage was titled Intestinal Drug Absorption Enhancement by Aloe Vera Gel and Whole Leaf Extract In Vitro Investigations into the Mechanisms of Action. I did two video presentations on this very study alone that you can find at the links below.
This review is taking one step further into addressing the sizes of molecules. Not every molecule faces the same challenge. Some are very small. However, others are extremely large, as molecules go.
If you are walking through a doorway with a backpack, that’s not very difficult. But what if you’re trying to move a full-size refrigerator through that same doorway?
Now you understand the challenge.
Small molecules often move through biological barriers much more easily than large molecules.
Large molecules…face a much greater obstacle.
Drugs like insulin face two significant challenges when taken by mouth. First, they can be broken down during digestion. Second, because they’re such large molecules, they’re absorbed very poorly across the intestinal barrier. That’s why insulin has historically been administered by injection rather than orally.
And that’s another reason why researchers are interested in Aloe gel and its Acemannan-rich polysaccharides.
If Aloe gel could temporarily increase permeability enough to help larger molecules cross those barriers…without permanently disrupting the body’s natural protection…it could represent an important advance in nutrient delivery.
“Everything we’ve discussed so far has focused on what scientists observed in laboratory models. Those studies are incredibly valuable because they help explain how Aloe gel and its polysaccharides (including Acemannan) appears to work. But eventually every researcher has to ask a larger question: Do those laboratory observations actually translate into a living organism?”
To help answer that question, the review points us to an animal study involving rats. And that study is titled: Evaluation of Isolated Fractions of Aloe vera Gel Materials on Indinavir Pharmacokinetics: In vitro and in vivo Studies. Published 2016. Instead of testing whole Aloe gel, the researchers took a different approach. They isolated and concentrated the polysaccharide fraction from Aloe vera gel—the carbohydrate molecules that make up much of the gel’s biological activity—and administered those polysaccharides along with a medication called indinavir, an antiviral drug used in the treatment of HIV infection.
What happened next was significant.
The rats that received indinavir by itself reached a maximum blood concentration of about 1,396 nanograms per milliliter. But when indinavir was administered together with the isolated Aloe polysaccharide fraction, that concentration increased to approximately 3,457 nanograms per milliliter—nearly a two-and-a-half-fold increase. In other words, substantially more of the drug reached the bloodstream when it was given with the Aloe polysaccharides than when it was given alone.
Understand that the investigators did not test 100% purified Acemannan by itself. They tested a precipitated polysaccharide fraction isolated from Aloe vera gel. This most certainly would include Acemannan. Because Acemannan is the active molecule, the active polysaccharide in Aloe that gives the Aloe plant its therapeutic virtues.
To understand the idea of precipitated polysaccharide fraction think of it first in terms of orange juice. If you precipitate freshly squeezed orange juice and your goal is to isolate the fraction of the juice called the pulp. You would filter, spin or perhapschemically separate it from the juice. This is called precipitation. The pulp, in the example of the orange juice, is called the precipitate.
So, this is how these researchers isolated the polysaccharides of Aloe gel to use in their experiment.
This animal study showed that those laboratory observations could translate into a measurable increase in the amount of a drug reaching the bloodstream in a living animal. That’s exactly the kind of progression we’d hope to see as a scientific hypothesis moves from the laboratory toward potential clinical application.
“We’ve now followed the evidence from laboratory cell studies into an entire living animal. But does the same principle hold true in people? Before we answer that, the review takes one more interesting detour. Researchers didn’t limit their investigation to the intestine. They also wanted to know whether Aloe gel might enhance transport across other biological barriers.
The first pathway is the one we’re all familiar with.
Oral delivery.
Simply put…this means swallowing something.
Whether it’s a vitamin…a nutritional supplement…
it must travel through the digestive system before entering the bloodstream.
This is where many compounds encounter their greatest challenge.
Some break down during digestion. Others are simply absorbed very poorly.
That’s why scientists became interested in whether Aloe gel could temporarily improve movement across the intestinal wall.
As we’ve already discussed… multiple laboratory investigations suggested that it could.
Now let’s look at Transdermal delivery.
“Trans” means across.
“Dermal” refers to the skin.
So transdermal simply means: through the skin.
Now that may surprise you.
We often think of our skin as completely waterproof.
But that’s not entirely true.
Certain medications…
nicotine patches…
hormone patches…
pain medications…
all rely on carefully crossing the skin barrier.
This review discusses studies showing that Aloe gel enhanced the movement of several compounds through the skin, although not every compound responded the same way.
The researchers didn’t claim Aloe gel improved everything.
Some compounds showed substantial enhancement.
Others showed very little.
Now we come to a third pathway that many people have never heard of.
Buccal delivery.
The word “buccal” simply refers to the inside lining of your cheek.
Believe it or not…that tissue can absorb certain compounds directly into the bloodstream.
That’s why some medications and essential oils dissolve or integrate under the tongue or inside the mouth.
Researchers investigated whether Aloe gel could improve transport across this tissue as well.
The answer was again encouraging.
The review summarizes studies showing improved permeability across the buccal tissue when Aloe gel was present.
XXXXAnd then the researchers brought into focus this study entitle: Effect of Aloe vera preparations on the human bioavailability of vitamins C and E. Published November 2005. The researchers summarize a randomized, double-blind, crossover human study involving eleven healthy adults.
Randomized means participants were assigned in a way that helps reduce bias.
Double-blind means neither the participants nor the researchers knew who was receiving which treatment until after the data had been collected.
That helps keep expectations from influencing the results.
And crossover means each participant eventually received both treatments at different times, allowing every person to serve as his or her own comparison.
That’s a very thoughtful and thorough study design.
I have covered a different scientific study on the same subject of Vitamins C and E in another video presentation at this website. The link is below.
The investigators in this studylooked at two familiar nutrients.
Vitamin C…and Vitamin E.
First…participants took the vitamins with water alone.
That became the comparison.
Then…they took those same vitamins together with Aloe gel preparations.
The results?
The review reports that Vitamin C exposure increased approximately 3.04-fold when taken with Aloe gel.
Vitamin E increased even more dramatically with Aloe gel—approximately 3.69-fold—while Aloe whole-leaf extract produced nearly a two-fold increase.
Those are substantial differences.
This does not mean Aloe gel or its polysaccharides triples the absorption of everything.
But it does point to improved bioavailability observed in human participants.
In fact, the authors specifically call for additional human studies and further investigation into the precise molecular mechanisms involved.
In light of all the studies that this review paper considered, the last question the researchers in this scientific review asked and one they did not bring up until the last paragraph was “Could Aloe gel, specifically its polysaccharides, (with Acemannan as the primary active ingredient), function as a bioenhancer of natural origin?”
As was the focus of this scientific review they drew on the large knowledge-base and the consistency that knowledge-base brought to the table, one that could not be ignored and introduced this new term, “bioenhancer,” at the very end.
So, with this term “bioenhancer” in mind, it’s worth pausing and going back to the very title of this scientific review and extract its significance. The authors didn’t simply call it Aloe vera Gel and Whole Leaf Extract for Drug Delivery. They chose the words Functional and Versatile Excipients for Drug Delivery. Every one of those words carries weight. An excipient is traditionally thought of as an inactive ingredient that helps formulate a product. But a functional excipient is different. It actively contributes to the performance of the formulation.
And by describing Aloe gel as versatile, the authors are suggesting something even more intriguing—that its potential benefits may extend across multiple compounds, multiple biological barriers, and multiple routes of delivery, all supported by the body of research this scientific review brings together.
Rather than viewing Aloe gel and its polysaccharides as simply another nutritional ingredient, this review explores whether they may become part of the very technology that helps nutrients reach the places where they can do their work more effectively. If future research continues to support this direction, the significance extends far beyond discovering another property of Aloe. It suggests that Aloe gel and its Acemannan-rich polysaccharides may represent a new functional category in nutritional science—not simply as ingredients to be delivered, but as functional and versatile bioenhancers that help deliver other compounds more effectively.
So, What should we conclude from everything we’ve learned?
By this point in the story…the evidence is no longer coming from just one laboratory.
It’s coming from multiple independent lines of investigation that are beginning to point in the same direction.
The purpose of this scientific review is to gather multiple scientific studies and help us move beyond isolated observations.
They allow us to see more of the forest…instead of only individual trees.
Every well-designed study becomes another piece of a much larger picture. And as those pieces come together, our confidence grows—not because curiosity has ended, but because the evidence continues to point us in the same direction. That’s the kind of understanding worth pursuing.
I hope you will always be careful to maintain good works to meet urgent needs and become heroes to your generation.