New York State goes after mislabeled herbal supplements

Big news in the herbal supplement world today: Four large US companies are told to stop selling mislabeled herbal supplements after DNA barcoding analysis of herbal ingredients. More below...

"New York Attorney General Targets Supplements at Major Retailers",
front page news on The New York Times, Feb 3, 2015
(screenshot from NYTimes.com's homepage by BotanicalAccuracy.com)

New York Attorney General has told four major US retail firms that sells herbal supplements to remove these from their shelves or they will face legal action.  This after the AG office tested herbal supplements bought at GNC, Target, Walgreens and Walmart and found that many of the sold products did not contain what they were sold as, and in some cases, contained undisclosed 'fillers' that could cause severe allergies (such as wheat and beans, etc.).  Here is the story in The New York Times this morning, and the associated article on the scientific findings. Fascinating reading, including the lack of garlic in garlic supplements, and the addition of pine shoots, asparagus, and a multitude of other plant species.

"What's in Those Supplements?", in The New York Times, Feb 3, 2015
(screenshot from NYTimes.com by BotanicalAccuracy.com)

"The authorities said they had run tests on popular store brands of herbal supplements at the retailers — Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC — which showed that roughly four out of five of the products contained none of the herbs listed on their labels. In many cases, the authorities said, the supplements contained little more than cheap fillers like rice and house plants, or substances that could be hazardous to people with food allergies. " (source)

It is about time.  Most people are probably unaware that the quality control of herbal supplements are in the hands of the suppliers, and FDA that oversees this market has not had the legal and financial tools to follow up on potentially fraudulent cases. Scientists have been testing herbal supplements, sushi fish, and herbal teas, etc., for quite some time and often found that labels did not match the content when it comes to species.  Often expensive ingredients were missing and replaced with cheaper ones.  But these scientists could not take action against the companies that inadvertently or on purpose changed their product and sold the wrong ingredients.  But now New York State's Attorney General took action. Hopefully this will start to clean up the herbal industry and help the suppliers that use quality-control, efficacy, and consumer safety as their main goals.

Adulteration, the introduction of, or replacement with, ingredients that are not listed on the label, is a serious issue, and can be caused by poor quality control at the source of the plant material (mislabeled or misidentified plants, etc.), and/or by on-purpose replacement of one ingredient with another without telling the consumer (often for economical reasons).  This is of course both fraudulent and dangerous, since many people have allergies and need to know exactly what they add to their diet.  Additionally, selling the wrong thing is a giant consumer fraud.


But, keep in mind, medicinal herbal science is really based on active ingredients, and these are often particular chemical compounds.  The main issues are if these sold herbal supplements contain both the correct species (the source and origin of the chemical compounds) and the active ingredients from those plants.  Not enough research is done on many of the chemicals in plants and their efficacy, but plants in general are powerful natural chemical factories that produce both compounds that can both help your body and kill you.  That is why it is important to know both the origin of the materials in the supplements and the concentration of active ingredients.

The method used in the analysis of these supplements is DNA barcoding.  It only works for supplements that still contain DNA from the original plant material, so for example bark, seeds, leaves, fruits, even in dried form.  It doesn't work after you have extracted only specific chemicals from a plant.  But many supplements are simply dried plant powder in capsules.  DNA barcoding means that you sequence one of several small pieces of the DNA of a plant and compare it to a big database that contains most plant species used in herbal medicine.  This database is growing each day as more and more sequences are added and can be analyzed.  Similarly, if you know the DNA barcode of a species you are looking for, you can test and see if your supplement contains this species. DNA barcoding is not a method without some problems, but used scientifically it is the best method around to identify pulverized or dried plant materials to species.  It is also used to identify unknown woods, meats, caviar, pathogenic fungi, and many other materials and organisms.
 
The result of this DNA testing by the AG office is not a test of the value and efficacy of herbal medicine in general or for any specific herbal species. The focus here is how much adulteration of ingredients that is going on in the mass-production of herbal supplements, so it is really a test of the self-regulation of the herbal industry. The AG office of New York State is going after commercial fraud, not the scientific value of herbal medicine, which is a very different topic and maybe something for another blogpost.

Some more reading for those of you that want to learn more about this topic:

American Botanical Council's Botanical Adulterants Program

"DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products", article by Newmaster et al., in BMC medicine, 2013 (see review and critique from ABC here)

Smithsonian research with DNA barcoding is making seafood substitution easier to catch, Smithsonian Science, 2011

'International Regulation Curbs Illegal Trade of Caviar', press release from American Museum of Natural History showing the decline of illegal caviar after DNA testing was put in place, 2012

Fungi this and fungi that, fungi known and fungi what?

All food products have to be marked with their ingredients, but it becomes a little complicated when what is in the packet of dried mushrooms you have just bought turns out to be three unnamed porcini species. Bryn Dentinger and Laura Suz from the Jodrell Lab at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (in United Kingdom) describe how they figured this out using modern molecular evolutionary methods in a recent paper in the journal PeerJ. (Here is a link to their research paper.)

Porcini mushrooms for sale.
Photo by Kristen Taylor (Creative Commons license, link)

So, how could this happen, and how common is this? We have described a lot of species on Earth, especially among plants.  But there are some organismal groups that are large uncharted areas on our biodiversity maps where not much is known, and fungi, bacteria, and insects are among those groups.  If you are looking for a career focused on new species descriptions, I recommend those groups, and maybe also other invertebrate groups and smaller algae.  There is a lot to find out!

Dentinger and Suz explain fungal discoveries: 

"Although taxonomists regard new fungal taxa as commonplace, they are often of little apparent consequence to human society and largely go unnoticed by the public. Like all groups of organisms, our knowledge of fungal diversity is biased towards taxa of greatest concern to ourselves, such as edible fungi. For example, wild mushrooms collected and sold as food around the world generally belong to a handful of well-known taxa (e.g., truffles and chanterelles), most of which have long histories of use in European cuisine. However, even some of these well-known groups have been shown to contain underappreciated levels of diversity. "

How did the researchers figure out that the package of Chinese porcini a friend of theirs had bought in London and brought to them as a dinner item had new species in it? Porcini belong to the Boletus genus, which include some incredibly delicious species, as well as some you definitely should not eat. I assume they got curious about the brown fungal bits in the bag, and decided to check it out. They took their samples to their molecular phylogenetics lab, extracted the DNA from individual pieces, and then compared those DNA sequences with all known porcini mushrooms' DNA. It turned out that the DNA sequences were different enough to warrant the first description of three new species from China. These new porcini species were named after Chinese common words: Boletus bainiugan, Boletus meiweiniuganjun, and Boletus shiyong (link to description article here). 

Can the same thing happen when you buy a bag of dried food plants?  Yes, it could, but it is probably less likely because we know more about the plant species of the world. 

Reference: Dentinger and Suz (2014), What’s for dinner? Undescribed species of porcini in a commercial packet. PeerJ 2:e570; DOI 10.7717/peerj.570

PS. So, truth to be told, fungi are not actually plants, but fungi have historically been included in botany since they also are sessile organisms stuck in the ground on land (usually, but not always). In reality fungi are actually more close evolutionary speaking to animals than to plants.  So, mushrooms are more closely related to bacon, than to potatoes and bamboo shoots. Vegetarians might want to consider that. :)  

Thanks to our blog reader EC for sending me the link to this interesting paper. 

What is in the herbal medicine? Maybe not what you think

Billions of dollars are spent on herbal supplements every year by people in the US. We buy our capsules with powders inside, dried roots, leaves, or flowers for teas, and powders to take as supplementary medicines or as health agents.  At the time the plant is in the tea bag, dried or a powder, it is no longer easy to identify it. But you can use its DNA to check its DNA barcode against a database of known, correct DNA barcodes for common medicinal plants.

Milk thistle, Silybum sp. (cc) Vilseskogen on Flickr.

That is what a group of Canadian scientists led by Steven Newmaster did (see research article).  A recent article in New York Times (Nov 5, 2013) describes how they bought a large sample of herbal supplements, and then sequenced the DNA inside each product to see if the label matched the content.  They also sequenced the real medicinal plants to build up a database of correct DNA barcodes to use  as a reference database.  This is all high-tech but also standard scientific practice work these days.
(Here is a good introduction to DNA barcoding.)

In about 60% of cases, the plants did not match the label. This is remarkable.  Imagine if the same kind of product fraud existed in the spice rack, at the meat counter, at the pharmacy, or when you buy garden bulbs.
"Sorry, your narcissus was a daylily!" 
"No wonder that beef tasted strange, it was frozen elephant meat."  
"Aspirin, cornstarch, or tylenol, no problem!"  
Why do we accept this for herbal products and from these health companies?

Is your herbal product from the right species?  Probably not. 
In this analysis of 12 herbal products, only 2 had exactly the right species (green bars).
Brown bars indicate the wrong species (with dark brown being inactive filler species).
(c) New York Times, Nov 5, 2013 (link)

Now this is scary.  Not only is this false marketing, but this can also be dangerous for people that have allergies to certain species and their compounds.  Also of great concern is if the producer of these products actually knows what is in their pills. What do you think? Are these inadvertent mistakes, or made on purpose, where they diluted the active plant with cheaper similar or inactive plant materials?

The producers often buy their plant ingredients from commercial suppliers, and they trust the supplier to know what each plant is.  Sometimes, even the supplier companies buy from a third party, the collector or grower of the plant somewhere in the world, and they just assume the plant is correct.  Considering how hard it is sometimes to identify a plant, especially in its ground and/or dried state, it might not be that strange that mistakes are happening.  But, that is not acceptable.

So, if you want to buy an herbal product, how do you know you get the safest and best one?  Well, you probably will never be totally sure.  Look for companies that provides standardized doses, that are reputable, and do not buy the cheapest stuff on ebay.  Ask the company who their suppliers are, and how they ensure the taxonomic accuracy of their products.  If they can't answer, well, then you have your answer. 

The Newmaster article states:

"Most of the herbal products tested were of poor quality, including considerable product substitution, contamination and use of fillers. These activities dilute the effectiveness of otherwise useful remedies, lowering the perceived value of all related products because of a lack of consumer confidence in them. We suggest that the herbal industry should embrace DNA barcoding for authenticating herbal products through testing of raw materials used in manufacturing products. "

I totally agree.  "Dear companies, please prove to your consumers that you put in the plant that you charge for.  Please list all ingredients.  It would also be helpful if you can standardize the doses of the active compounds in your product.  While you are at it, also make sure you include scientific names, and list the provenance (geographic origin) of your plant supplies."  After all, isn't that the least we can ask for?  They are starting to use DNA bar codes to check the fish species served on restaurant plates, and we demand the same for other sold products like herbals used in alternative medicine.

A herbalist that uses local plants is often much more knowledgeable about the plant species than the commercial companies, collects the plants herself/himself, and provides a local, small-scale product that is more likely to have the right species in it than one that you buy from a shelf.  That said, it is harder for a herbalist to know exactly how strong the doses is in the final product, since that usually takes some chemical analysis.  

Sources:

Herbal Supplements Are Often Not What They Seem (New York Times, Nov 5, 2013)

DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products by Newmaster et al., 2013, BMC Medicine 11:222; doi:10.1186/1741-7015-11-222