Plant polysaccharides as emulsifiers in pharmaceutical emulsions

Nature has furnished us with a wide range of materials to assist, boost, and sustain the health of all living things. These natural things are attractive alternatives to synthetic ones as they are chemically inert in nature, cheap, biocompatible, eco-friendly, and widely available. They can also be altered in many different ways to get desired materials for formulation and thus can compete with the available synthetic additives. Natural plant gums are also called plant polysaccharides, and they are obtained from both higher and lower plants. They are present in the lignocellulosic cell wall and their main function is to store energy and carbon substances. They have the ability to thicken aqueous systems and to control water, therefore they are used in pharmaceutical industries as adhesives, crystallization inhibitors, emulsifying agents, emulsion stabilizers, encapsulating agents, film formers, foam stabilizers, suspending agents, and suspension stabilizers, etc. Emulsifiers play two distinct roles in the emulsion formation: they promote the formation of fine lipid droplets during homogenization, and they maintain the stability of the lipid droplets over a range of environmental conditions. Many different varieties are available in the structural composition of plant polysaccharide, which are not only obtained with different plants, but also with the part of the plant that they originate from, such as the leaves, seeds, roots, and tubers. In this chapter we are focusing on natural emulsifiers, their availability according to their occurrence, chemical compositions, chemical structure, and applications in pharmaceutical products apart from emulsifiers.