question: Why do products that have an active ingredient need other ingredients?
comment: One good example is artificial sweetener. 99% of what's in those little packets is filler, because most artificial sweeteners are *super* sweet. So sweet you only need a tiny, tiny bit to make your coffee sweet. They have to bulk out the contents with filler because most people aren't going to deal with trying to put a milligram of sweetener in a drink.
passages: In contrast with the active ingredients, the inactive ingredients are usually called excipients in pharmaceutical contexts. The main excipient that serves as a medium for conveying the active ingredient is usually called the vehicle. Petrolatum and mineral oil are common vehicles.
  
  Section::::Pharmaceuticals.
   The dosage form for a pharmaceutical contains the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), which is the drug substance itself, and excipients, which are the ingredients of the tablet, or the liquid the API is suspended in, or other material that is pharmaceutically inert. Drugs are chosen primarily for their active ingredients.During formulation development, the excipients are chosen carefully so that the active ingredient can reach the target site in the body at the desired rate and extent. 
   Formulation scientists and technologists need tools to select ingredients for new formulations. Tablets contain multiple ingredients beyond the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) such as fillers, tableting agents, disintegrants, and absorption enhancers or agents that slow down and control absorption. Choice of materials is important to assure the flow characteristics, potency, and absorption of specific formulations. In addition, proper particle size grades of the ingredients must be selected to produce an optimum blend for capsule filling.
  
  Section::::Methods.
   Often, an ingredient is also needed to act as a "disintegrant" to aid tablet dispersion once swallowed, releasing the API for absorption. Some binders, such as starch and cellulose, are also excellent disintegrants.
  
  Section::::Advantages and disadvantages.
   Ingredient
  
  An ingredient is a substance that forms part of a mixture (in a general sense). For example, in cooking, recipes specify which ingredients are used to prepare a specific dish. Many commercial products contain secret ingredients that are purported to make them better than competing products. In the pharmaceutical industry, an active ingredient is that part of a formulation that yields the effect expected by the customer.
  
  National laws usually require prepared food products to display a list of ingredients, and specifically require that certain additives be listed.
   The terms active constituent or active principle are often chosen when referring to the active substance of interest in a plant (such as salicylic acid in willow bark or arecoline in areca nuts), because the word "ingredient" in many minds connotes a sense of human agency (that is, something that a person combines with other substances), whereas the natural products present in plants were not added by any human agency but rather occurred naturally ("a plant doesn't have ingredients"). 
   Formulation studies then consider such factors as particle size, polymorphism, pH, and solubility, as all of these can influence bioavailability and hence the activity of a drug. The drug must be combined with inactive ingredients by a method which ensures that the quantity of drug present is consistent in each dosage unit e.g. each tablet. The dosage should have a uniform appearance, with an acceptable taste, tablet hardness, and capsule disintegration.
   The term constituent is often chosen when referring to the substances that constitute the tissue of living beings such as plants and people, because the word "ingredient" in many minds connotes a sense of human agency (that is, something that a person combines with other substances), whereas the natural products present in living beings were not added by any human agency but rather occurred naturally ("a plant doesn't have ingredients"). Thus all ingredients are constituents, but not all constituents are ingredients.
  
  Section::::Artificial ingredient.
  
  An artificial ingredient usually refers to an ingredient which is artificial or man-made, such as:
   Active ingredient
  
  An active ingredient (AI) is the ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug or pesticide that is biologically active. The similar terms active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and bulk active are also used in medicine, and the term active substance may be used for natural products. Some medication products may contain more than one active ingredient. The traditional word for the API is pharmacon or pharmakon (from , adapted from pharmacos) which originally denoted a magical substance or drug. 
   In phytopharmaceutical or herbal medicine, the active ingredient may be either unknown or may require cofactors in order to achieve therapeutic goals. This leads to complications in labelling. One way manufacturers have attempted to indicate strength is to engage in standardization to a marker compound. However, standardization has not been achieved yet: different companies use different markers, or different levels of the same markers, or different methods of testing for marker compounds. For instance, St John's wort is often standardized to the hypericin which is now known not to be the "active ingredient" for antidepressant use. Other companies standardize to hyperforin or both, although there may be some 24 known possible active constituents. Many herbalists believe that the active ingredient in a plant is the plant itself.
   Ingredient-branding takes a special position in marketing, as it cannot be clearly allocated to either industrial or consumer goods marketing. On the one hand, the consumer is the end-user of the ingredient, but at the same time is not part of the buying decision for the component, as this is up to the producer of the end product. On the other hand the producer will only decide on the usage of the ingredient - or at least take it into account in the communication policy - if the image of this ingredient will have an effect on the consumer, meaning a positive influence on his or her buying decision.
   Condiments are sometimes added prior to serving, for example, in a sandwich made with ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise. Some condiments are used during cooking to add flavor or texture: barbecue sauce, compound butter, teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, and marmite and sour cream are examples.
  
  Many condiments, such as mustard or ketchup, are available in single-serving packets, commonly when supplied with take-out or fast-food meals. 
  
  Section::::Definition.
   Some APIs may be tableted as pure substances, but this is rarely the case; most formulations include excipients. Normally, a pharmacologically inactive ingredient (excipient) termed a "binder" is added to help hold the tablet together and give it strength. A wide variety of binders may be used, some common ones including lactose, dibasic calcium phosphate, sucrose, corn (maize) starch, microcrystalline cellulose, povidone polyvinylpyrrolidone and modified cellulose (for example hydroxypropyl methylcellulose and hydroxyethylcellulose).
   Single-, double-, or triple-bases (depending on the number of primary ingredients) are homogeneous mixtures of one to three primary ingredients. These primary ingredients must include fuel and oxidizer and often also include binders and plasticizers. All components are macroscopically indistinguishable and often blended as liquids and cured in a single batch. Ingredients can often have multiple roles. For example, RDX is both a fuel and oxidizer while nitrocellulose is a fuel, oxidizer, and plasticizer.
   Section::::Other examples of product formulations.
  
  Formulations are commercially produced for drugs, cosmetics, coatings, dyes, alloys, cleaning agents, foods, lubricants, fuels, fertilisers, pesticides and many others.
  
  Section::::Components.
  
  Components (also called ingredients), when mixed according to a formula, create a formulation.
  
  Some components impart specific properties to the formulation when it is put into use. For example, certain components (polymers) are used in paint formulations to achieve deforming or levelling properties. Some components of a formulation may only be active in particular applications.
  
  A formulation may be created for any of the following purposes:
   Most speciality chemicals are organic chemicals that are used in a wide range of every day products used by consumers and industry. It is a consumer driven sector and as such the specialty chemical industry has to be innovative, entrepreneurial and consumer-driven. In contrast to the production of commodity chemicals that are usually made on large scale single product manufacturing units to achieve economies of scale, specialty manufacturing units are required to be flexible because the products, raw materials, processes &, operating conditions and equipment mix may change on a regular basis to respond to the needs of customers.
   In most developed countries, the law requires that ingredients be listed according to their relative weight in the product. If an ingredient itself consists of more than one ingredient (such as the cookie pieces which are a part of "cookies and cream" flavor ice cream), then that ingredient is listed by what percentage of the total product it occupies, with its own ingredients displayed next to it in brackets.
   Pharmaceutical regulations and standards require that all ingredients in drugs, as well as their chemical decomposition products, be identified and shown to be safe. Often, more excipient is found in a final drug formulation than active ingredient, and practically all marketed drugs contain excipients. As with new drug substances and dosage forms thereof, novel excipients themselves can be patented; sometimes, however, a particular formulation involving them is kept as a trade secret instead (if not easily reverse-engineered).
   Section::::Later years.
   Patients often have difficulty identifying the active ingredients in their medication, and are often unaware of the notion of an active ingredient. When patients are on multiple medications, active ingredients can interfere with each other, often resulting in severe or life-threatening complications. There now exist online services which can identify the active ingredient of most medications, such as the Medicines database providing information on medications available in Australia.
  
  Section::::Herbal medicine.
   Speciality chemicals are materials used on the basis of their performance or function. Consequently, in addition to "effect" chemicals they are sometimes referred to as "performance" chemicals or "formulation" chemicals. They can be unique molecules or mixtures of molecules known as formulations. The physical and chemical characteristics of the single molecules or the formulated mixtures of molecules and the composition of the mixtures influences the performance end product. In commercial applications the companies providing these products more often than not provide targeted customer service to innovative individual technical solutions for their customers. This is a differentiating component of the service provided by speciality chemical producers when they are compared to the other sub-sectors of the chemical industry such as fine chemicals, commodity chemicals, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals.
   In marketing, a whole product is a generic product (or core product) augmented by everything that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy. The core product is the tangible product that the customer experiences. The whole product typically augments the core product with additional elements required for the product to have compelling value to a customer. For example, if a personal computer is the core product, then whole product would include software applications, training classes, peripheral devices (mouse, keyboard, printer, etc.), and internet service. Without these additional product components, the core product would not be very useful.
   Cooperative advertising can be used to stimulate the end product manufacturer to advertise the ingredient, though it is seldom done. While "Intel Inside" has success with this large cooperative advertising program, there are few cooperative advertising program offered by other ingredient suppliers. 
   BULLET::::3. Solvent property
  
  BULLET::::4. Irritant effects
  
  BULLET::::5. Ease of application and removal
  
  BULLET::::- Methods of preparation of ointments
  
  Trituration: In this finely subdivided insoluble medicaments are evenly distributed by grinding with a small amount of the base followed by dilution with gradually increasing amounts of the base.
  
  Fusion: In this method the ingredients are melted together in descending order of their melting points and stirred to ensure homogeneity.
  
  Section::::Classes.:Gel.
   There are additional ingredients that may fall under the category of one of the five constituents. Carbohydrates, for example, include but are not limited to:
  
  BULLET::::- Dietary fibers
  
  BULLET::::- Sugars
  
  BULLET::::- Sugar alcohol
  
  Whereas ash includes but is not limited to:
  
  BULLET::::- Dietary minerals (sodium, potassium, iron, calcium)
  
  BULLET::::- Vitamins (β-Carotene, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin D, B vitamins)
  
  Although proximates do not give the entire nutritional assay, they are an inexpensive way to track deviations in the quality of foods.
  