Selecting the best silver product for your patients can be difficult. Peer-reviewed research indicates the most important elements in assessing silver products’ safety and efficacy are form or type of silver, particle size, positively-charged silver, and purity. So how to make sense of it all when competing brands make a variety of claims regarding “higher ppm” or “more concentrated” silver.
Here are a few key points to help you evaluate products and ensure that you are recommending the safest* and most effective* product available.
Positive Charge
Argentyn 23 Professional Bio-Active Silver Hydrosol contains greater than 98% positively-charged silver ions and silver nanoclusters.
Positively-charged silver ions are the bio-active form of silver, meaning that the silver is bioavailable and useful. Research has found that positively-charged silver ions create an environment that is unfriendly to unwanted microorganisms, whereas the neutral silver metal particles have a “negligible effect”.1
Particle Size
If silver is not positively charged, it is not bio-active. Particle size greatly impacts the efficacy of silver products because smaller silver particles supply more surface area and, therefore, have greater potential for releasing beneficial bio-active silver ions into the system during the short time the silver remains in the body.
Argentyn 23 has an unprecedented particle size as small as 0.8 nm (nanometers). For perspective, that is about three silver atoms in diameter, meaning nearly all of the silver atoms are on the surface of the particle, and available to contribute to the bio-activity. This equates to >98% bioavailability for Bio-Active Silver Hydrosol, and therefore extremely little waste as almost all of the silver is able to provide immune support* for the body.
With the smallest particles and the highest ratio of positively charged silver ions and nanoclusters, Argentyn 23 Professional Bio-Active Silver Hydrosol is easily absorbed into and excreted from the body. Higher concentrations of total silver with larger particles can lead to increased risks for toxicity.
Purity
Argentyn 23 Professional Bio-Active Silver Hydrosol contains only two ingredients: 99.999% pure silver and water that meets USP-NF standards for pharmaceutical-grade purified water. It is bottled in dark amber glass to preserve its purity and effectiveness* throughout its shelf life and is tested for endotoxins to ensure no microbial contamination is, or ever was, potentially affecting the product. Our manufacturing facility is an NSF-Registered GMP facility, and each batch’s purity (absence of microbial contaminants) and concentration (23 ppm) is confirmed at 3 years shelf life.
Parts Per Million (PPM)
Parts per million is an amount or mass of silver per unit volume. The units of PPM are equivalent to the units of micrograms per mL. PPM tells you what weight of silver is in the bottle, and nothing about what the particle size is.
Silver dietary supplement labels show the TOTAL silver concentration; but effectiveness* is indicated by the bio-active silver concentration. The bio-active silver concentration is a function of both the amount of positively charged silver and the number of atoms on the surface of the particles.
Less is more when considering silver ppm. Particles that are as small as a single nanometer allow for better conversion to bioactivity, even in a low concentration.
A good analogy is to imagine you need to resurface a driveway, and you order the rock by total mass needed and make no mention of particle size. One vendor delivers 20 tons of gravel, the smallest particle size achievable; it’s the useful particle size, spreads out to cover a large surface area, and is properly utilized. A different vendor delivers 20 tons of boulders; this is not a functional form and in fact you crash your car into the boulders trying to go down the driveway, and you now have all of this wasted material that you have to remove and get rid of.
This is exactly what the body sees. Particles that are too large aren’t functional, and leave massive amounts of wasted material that have to be excreted. So when picking a silver product, one has to look deeper and consider both PPM and the particle size.
When a professional silver product contains the most active form of silver, coupled with the smallest particle size and the greatest amount of positively-charged silver, then a safe*, low concentration of 23 ppm bioactive-silver is all that is needed.
Higher concentrations of total silver can lead to increasing risks for toxicity.
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References
- Xiu Z-m, Zhang Q-b, et al., Negligible particle-specific antibacterial activity of silver nanoparticles. Nano Letters, 2012. 12(8): p. 4271-4275.
- Bergin IL, Wilding LA, et al., Effects of particle size and coating on toxicologic parameters, fecal elimination kinetics and tissue distribution of acutely ingested silver nanoparticles in a mouse model. Nanotoxicology, 2016. 10(3): p. 352-360.
- Liu J, Wang Z, et al., Chemical transformations of nanosilver in biological environments. ACS Nano, 2012. 6(11): p. 9887-9899.
