Where would we be without plants? Aside from being a whole lot hungrier, we’d also lose nearly all of medicine and quite a few other fields besides. Modern medical and therapeutic sciences all have their start in alchemy and apothecary, which is why to this day your local pharmacist has a logo with a mortar and pestle on it.
Plant-based cosmetics have been the default in most of the history of beauty care. In fact, even chemical compounds created in laboratories actually start out with organic plant extracts which are then altered by chemical processes. But new discoveries in the biology fields have shown that even this much chemistry may be redundant. Plants have many natural gifts to offer in stem cells, peptides, terpenes, alkaloids, and essential oils. They give us natural starting points for everything from stem cell masks for skin treatments to botanical shampoos.
We’re more in harmony with nature than we know
In fields such as nutrition and wellness, we repeatedly see a connection between the human body and its environment, baked into our nature over thousands of years of evolution. Whenever we try to replace our natural environmental interactions with an artificial substitute, we usually lose something in the translation. Instead, it’s proven out that all of us are a product of nature, having evolved symbiotic relationships with other living things.
For instance, so many of our essential nutrients come from plants that it’s difficult to replace them with any other source. Our dependence on minerals is further evidence of our need for plants because minerals come from the soil where plants grow. And when it comes to medicine and cosmetics, the majority of them are derived from plant extracts as well. Everything from aspirin to codeine to ephedrine starts out being harvested from plants.
Plants have these compounds for a reason
It seems odd that nature just happened to have all these useful organic substances produced by plants waiting for us to discover them one by one. But in fact, this was no accident, as plants evolved these various compounds as defense mechanisms and survival strategies to thrive in their environment. For example, plant stem cells are responsible for repairing damage and regenerating plant tissue. That same power can be harvested and applied to human skin as well.
Likewise, various other organic compounds produced by plants serve other purposes, such as attracting pollinating insects or repelling harmful predators. Without the plant having evolved to produce that compound, we likely never would have thought to invent it synthetically. There’s virtually nothing we can create in a laboratory that some species growing somewhere in the world hasn’t produced organically.
Our bodies are predestined to make use of plant extracts
The botanical kingdom formed alongside humans for hundreds of thousands of years, promoting our survival even before we understood how they worked. Consequently, our bodies know how to use a plant compound when it’s introduced to our system right away. Antioxidants, vitamins, and natural emollients are efficiently processed when we apply them since they’ve been used for centuries and have become familiar with our system.
Ecologists and environmentalists have been pointing out that we need a thriving ecosystem around us in order to survive. Even incidental plant characteristics impact our well-being, right down to our sense of smell taking in essential oils in aromatherapy. Need we argue as a final point, plants produce the oxygen we breathe, which is the strongest case we can make for our biological dependence on plants.