No, you are not allergic to pretty flowers...

During this year's pollen season, the usual misinformation about pollen allergies crop up and grow fast in the media, online as well as in print.  Sneezing and astmathic people and their medications are often incorrectly associated with colorful flower imagery, when in reality very few people are allergic to the flowers that most of us know and love. But to advertising people, small tiny green flowers with dangly stamens might not be as photogenic as make-a-wish dandelion fruits and fields of flowering canola.

These ox-eye daisy flowers in this Shutterstock image on the Rocky Mountain Allergy Asthma Immunology website has absolutely nothing to do with pollen allergies. They are just pretty flowers. 
(Screenshot image by BotanicalAccuracy.com, source.)

A screenshot from a quick search on the keywords 'pollen allergy' on the photo website Shutterstock, shows an abundance of photos of insect-pollinating plants, flowering fields, and dandelion fruiting heads which has nothing to do with pollen allergies.  Some photos get it right but not the majority. (Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com, source.)

Pollen, which are special small cells in seed plants that contain the male sex cells (no, it is not gross, just the fact), are produced in flowers and when the pollen lands on the female part of a flower or cone (the landing platform is called a stigma), the pollen germinates and a pollen tube grows into the female style and down into the ovary where it can fertilize the plant's egg cell and make a seed. This is not gross, just the facts, and in fact, if there were no pollen, there would be no fruits, no flowers, no seed plants. Seed plants are those that set seed, so that means conifers and flowering plants, but not ferns and mosses, because they have spores instead. Not all pollen causes allergies and neither does all spores.

Pollen grains from many different plant species shown in a photo from a Scanning Electron Microscope. (Public domain image from Dartmouth College Electron Microscope Facility via Wikimedia Commons, source.)

So, how does the pollen gets transported from the male to the female part in the flower? Most plants use animals as transport helpers (for bee pollination, etc.), but some plants have wind-pollination.  If you are adapted to use wind as the pollination method, then you are going to have some problems to overcome - first, wind is kind of random so you don't know where your pollen would end up, so you better make LOTS of pollen; second, you don't want your pollen to stick to anything that isn't the right stigma, so it needs to be dry and smooth and fly easily; and third, you need to make your pollen-sacs hang out far into the air without interference from large petals, so you can disperse your pollen with every little wind burst. These three evolutionary adaptations are seen in many wind-pollinated plants.  So, these plants produce an copious masses of dry, easy-flying pollen from small flowers with hanging pollen sacs.  This is exactly how birches, ragweed, grasses, walnuts, mugwort, elms, pigweeds, cottonwoods, and hickories spread their pollen around.  And these plants are the ones people who suffer from pollen allergies are allergic to (see caveat below).

Flowers of a grass, showing stamens with pollen sacs hanging out and spreading their light dusty pollen into our eyes and noses (and to other grasses). (Creative Commons photo by Dave Kleinschmidt, source)

Many people think they are allergic to goldenrod, this common, yellow-flowered fall flower, but it is insect-pollinated.  Plants that are pollinated by insects have 1) something that attracts the insect to the flower, usually sweet smell and bright colors, 2) sticky pollen that gets stuck on the insect, and 3) small amounts of pollen.  You can easily tell if a plant is insect or wind-pollinated by looking at its flower and checking if any pollen flies out in the air if you shake it (this only happens in wind-pollinated flowers).  There are also plants pollinated by mammals, birds, and other small animals, as well as water, but those are more rare.  In North America, the hummingbirds are the only birds that pollinate flowers.

VividLife illustrates their POllen Allergy Awareness article with a nice, invasive thistle, pollinating insect included.  Of course, it has colorful small pink petals (in a big flower head), sticky pollen, and is not something that easily causes pollen allergies. Another blatant example of wrong imagery in the pollen allergy area (Screenshot by Botanical Accuracy, source)

 So, when your neighbor says that he can't go outside because the dandelions are flowering, or there is a newspaper article about hay fever illustrated with a pretty flower, or your oldish aunt says she is allergic to the pollen of cut flowers in a vase, they will most likely be very wrong.  (Some people are allergic to the smell of pretty flowers, but that is different.)  Still, the misconceptions are flying like airborne wind-dispersed pollen in advertising, news media, and around lunch tables.

News article about herbal remedies for hayfever in The Epoch Times, May 21-27, 2015,
illustrated with a sneezing girl in front of a flowering canola field (which is not a wind-pollinated flower),
and with dandelion fruits blowing away below. (Photo by BotanicalAccuracy.com)

An other prevalent misconception shown in allergy imagery, even on the websites of medical and pharmaceutical companies based on science, is the (non-existent) connection between dandelions' fruiting puffy heads and allergies.  No, you are not allergic to flying dandelion parachute fruits and seeds, despite all those photos and ads showing exactly this connection.

Article from Mass Lunch & Allergy PC illustrated dandelion heads under the heading Pollen Allergy. Please note that the fruiting dandelion head not only has no pollen in it, it is also a fruit, not a flower. The grass would be the allergen to most hay fever suffers. (Screenshot by Botanical Accuracy, source)

In this image below, there isn't even one potential flower and no pollen source at all:

Freedom Home Care has an article called How to Keep Seasonal Allergies Under COntrol, and it is 100% illustrated with a no-pollen part of an insect-pollinated plant - Dandelion fruiting heads, again. Such misuse of images just creates confusion and makes the public afraid of real nature. (Screenshot by Botanical Accuracy, source)

 

 

 So, why does these image mistakes matter?  It is just a picture, right?  Well, they matter a lot.  The public reads the information and associates the allergies with the images that are used to illustrate them.  Allergies means medical problems (bad stuff). We start to think allergies when we see canola fields, blowing wishes with dandelion heads, and pretty flowers.  It is 'guilty by association' and just more of the fear of nature that is spread around in media.  Fact checking should not only be for the words but also for the images that goes with the words. Some allergy doctors and pharmaceutical companies are just as guilty as photo databases in this area.

Caveat: This blog post is based on what most people are allergic to that react to pollen.  You could become allergic to nearly anything, so a small percentage of people could be allergic to tulip pollen, rose petals, and goldenrod pollen, but that is very, very rare.  When testing for allergies, it is the wind-pollinated plants that count.

Links for more information:
American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology: Pollen Allergy: Be aware that this webpage has some overly simplistic descriptions about the biology and biodiversity of plants.  For example: "Pollen is very fine powder that comes from trees, grasses, flowers and weeds." and "When a plant begins to flower, its pollen goes into the air."  They need a biologist fact checker.  No need to make things so simple fo the public that is becomes wrong.

Many thanks to KS for medical allergy testing information.

Pollen allergy? Not from thistles

This ad is marketing the allergy medicine Singulair (Merck) and it is titled 'go nose to nose with allergies'.  And right next to the nose is a very spiny, evil-looking thistle head with an abundance of red, small tubular flowers ready to release their pollen.

The problem is that people are mostly allergic to wind-pollinated plants that release dust clouds of dry pollen grains that fly through the air freely and land in our noses, eyes, and mouths.  The non-wind pollinated plants, such as thistles, get visited by insects that carry the pollen from flower to flower.  For the pollen to be a carried by insects, the pollen needs to be sticky so it stays on the animal.  And sticky pollen doesn't fly through the air freely and enters your nose as dust.  So, thistles are not common allergy plants at all.

The most common allergy-inducing plants are wind-pollinated grasses, some weeds (which is a group of a variety of unrelated species), and trees in the plant families containing oaks, birches, and other wind-pollinated trees.  But too often the insect-flowering plants that flower at the same time as the wind-pollinated allergens get the blame, as in this case.

I also think the Singulair marketers rather have a spiny evil-looking weed like the thistle in the ad, than a fragile grass with rather small, obscure flowers. But the use of the thistle spreads misinformation. People might start to pull up goldenrods, thistles, and clover because they think they cause pollen allergies, which is not true at all. If I was working at Merck, the producer of Singulair, I would be very embarrassed over this mistake.  

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

"Rosa arctica" - the Kiehl's plant that doesn't exist

Rosa Arctica cream.
© Kiehl's, fair use

Instead of using the wrong name for a plant, you can invent a new scientific plant name to help you market a new product. This is the case for Kiehl's recently released products named ROSA ARCTICA, based on the 'resurrection flower', a rare plant named Haberlea rhodopensis in the African violet family (Gesneriaceae) and used as an anti-aging ingredient. This plant has nothing to do with roses, and the genus Rosa. There is no species previously named Rosa arctica, but Rosa is the rose genus, and arctica stands for being from the Arctic (which this plant is not from). And there is no ingredient derived from real roses in the product either.

 It appears that the naming of this product is a total marketing scam and misrepresentation, and an attempt to come up with a scientifically sounding product name that is also attractive to buyers.

I guess Haberlea rhodopensis didn't sound too great to the PR department, so they just invented a new name - which you can't really do in science. In marketing, sure, but I would consider this false marketing since Kiehl's are using an irrelevant and incorrect scientific name.   But it works, and Vanity Fair likes the name, since they wrote:

"[...] Kiehl’s scientists have taken this flower and made a
fabulous cream with it, aptly named Rosa Arctica."

What is so aptly with a name that doesn't represent the source plant? Imagine if it had been a name of a chemical name that had been changed into a new name similar to a harmless chemical and used for marketing. 

This case is also similar to the renaming of Patagonian Toothfish to Chilean Sea Bass to boost sales, except in this case they adopted the highly regulated scientific naming system for species for their marketing name - Kiehl's didn't just invent a new common name, which would have been much less disturbing.

Here is Kiehl's website ad for ROSA ARCTICA:

ROSA ARCTICA, skin cream by Kiehl's.  Image © Kiehl's, fair use

The flowers in the foreground in the ad are supposed to be Haberlea rhodopensis, I assume, but the flowers in the ad are not very similar to the actual flowers of the plant (see photo here from Dave's Garden website). Not much is known about this plant, also called Resurrection Flower, found in the mountains of Greece and Bulgaria.  It can survive for a long time, over two years, without much water, and then 'come to life' again when watered.

Extracts from the plant has been shown to help human skin (reference link), but at least some of this research was done by the company, Induchem, that is selling the extract, not by independent scientists.

On the official ingredient list on the product packaging, the extract from the plant (listed as 'Haberlea rhodopensis leaf extract', correctly according to INCI) is in or near the very end of the ingredient list, meaning that it is the ingredient with the smallest concentration in the final product. However, the inaccuracies continue, because on the Kiehl's website, the ingredient is listed as "Rosa Arctica (Haberlea rhodopensis)", which is totally inaccurate.  There is nothing called this name in nature, nor in INCI's official list of plant-derived ingredients.  And the reason is, of course, that Rosa Arctica does not exist, except as a marketing ploy for selling more of Kiehl's products.  It might work great on your skin, but there is no logical or ethical reason why this product should have a fake scientific name.

Apple's Siri ad: wrong poison oak

Ad for Siri and iPhone 4 in The Economist. 
Photo by Vilseskogen on Flickr, Creative Commons license.

In July 2012 Apple ran a print-ad featuring their new iPhone 4S and its Siri answering system, featuring the question "What does poison oak look like?" The photo above is from the ad printed on the back of the magazine The Economist.

The problem is that the answer Siri gave in the ad is not correct. That is not how poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) looks like, that is how poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) looks like. Both are members of the Anacardiaceae family, which also includes mango, pistachio, cashew and rose pepper. There are also several other species of Toxicodendron in North America, all of them toxic.

In fact, the photo shown in the ad is the photo of poison ivy from Wikipedia. Both species are toxic and give horrible dermatitis, but they occur in different parts of the country. Generally speaking, if you are on the west coast of North America you have to look out for poison oak, and if you are east of the Rocky Mountains and in the eastern part of the United States, you better learn quickly how poison ivy looks like.CDC has a good overview of the different toxic North American species in Toxicodendron.

The mistake was covered by several media stories, here are some: Philadelphia Inquirer, CNet and Neowin.

The dermatitis caused by these species can be very severe, and this is a plant group we all should be able to identify. If you ask Siri to look up poison oak you get the correct answer, so the botanical inaccuracy most likely happened in the making of the ad.  Since these are some of the most common and most toxic species we have in North America, this mistake is not minor...