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

Artemisia, a spelling misery

The large genus Artemisia in the sunflower family (Asteraceae) contains some very potent plants and is well-known around the world for a variety of good and bad reasons.   Common English names include sagebrush, wormwood, and mugwort.

For people allergic to pollen, the weedy mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is probably a large cause of their respiratory problems in early fall.  For people suffering from malaria, the old Chinese herbal derived from the species Artemisia annua has been developed into a highly efficient anti-malarial medicine.  Then there is Artemisia absinthium, the source of the green-colored alcoholic liquid absinthe of early 20th century fame.  And there is more.  Tarragon, the culinary herb, is a sterile, vegetatively propagated  Artemisia species. There are hundreds of species of Artemisia in the world.

Artemisia absinthium, the plant that is included in absinthe.  Species in this genus have finely divided leaves that often are silvery, and wind-pollinated flowers that are clustered in small, hanging heads.
Image source: Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Artemisia is named after the Ancient Greek goddess Artemis, and her name is also used as a source of many names and places outside of botany (see Wikipedia list). She was the deity associated with hunting, childbirth, and wild places. A greek botanist and doctor, Artemisia II of Caria, was named after Artemis, and the name of the genus might have been in her honor, especially since these plants are highly medicinal and have been used as herbals since ancient times.

Surprisingly, in a travel article in The New York Times this weekend about 'absinthe trails' on the border between Switzerland and France, the name of the genus was given as Artemesia, not Artemisia.

"In particular, its namesake ingredient, grand wormwood — Artemesia absinthum in Latin, and simply called “absinthe” in French — might have been found all over Europe, but the type of wormwood that grew in the Val-de-Travers and nearby Franche-Comté was said to be vastly superior."  (source)

Yes, The New York Times also didn't italicize the scientific name, but they apparently never do.  But, for a newspaper that pride themselves on accuracy and correct facts and grammar, scientific names do not seem to get spell-checked a lot.  On May 30, 2014, they published an article on dandelions and it included this sentence:

"The dandelion (Taraxacum officianale) arrived with the first Europeans and can now be found throughout North America. "   (source)

The correct name is Taraxacum officinale, for this most ubiquitous of our lawn weeds. No idea how that extra 'a' got in there...  For biology, this is as much of a mistake as misspelling Obama or Boehner in political writing. For more on formatting and use of scientific names, take a look at this blogpost.

Despite Artemisia being widely used and present, the genus name is often misspelled.  The spelling as Artemesia is common (example 1, example 2), and often Artemisia herbals are sold under 'Artemesia' even if the bottle label correctly says 'Artemisia'.  Is there something in the sound of this name that make us misspell this name inadvertently?

"Magic Seed 100 Mugwort Seeds Artemesia" for sale on Amazon.com by Magic Seed company.
Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

 To conclude, here are seeds of mugwort (as 'Artemesia Vulgaris') for sale on Amazon.com. It should be Artemisia vulgaris.   The ad also states "Easy to grow, grows like crazy once established'.  Yes, indeed. It is a common, noxious weed and regulated in some states, and a not something you want to have in your vegetable garden.  If you need some mugwort, you will probably find it really easily anyway, without having to grow it from seed.

(It should be noted that the spelling 'Artemesia' is used for a music band, as a family or given name, and for some buildings. But it isn't used for the plant. )

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

Gordolobo is or isn't mullein?

 On a recent trip to Minnesota I bought a packet of Mexican herbs by the company Mi Costeñita sold as Gordolobo, a common medicinal plant used in traditional medicine. Under the Mexican name, the translated name in English was listed as 'mullein leaves'.

'Gordolobo mullein leaves', which is instead some Asteraceae flowers.
(cc) BotanicalAccuracy.com

A closer inspection of the packet revealed that the content was certainly not dried leaves, certainly not mullein's fuzzy leaves, but something that looked like flower heads of the plant family Asteraceae (similar to everlasting flower heads). Here is a close-up photo.

Close up of'Gordolobo mullein leaves', which is Asteraceae flowers.
(cc) BotanicalAccuracy.com

It seems that the content of this packet is flower heads of gordolobo, which in English is also called "Rabbit Tobacco, Sweet Everlasting, Cudweed, Old Field Balsam, Sweet White Balsam, Indian Posy, Life of Man, Poverty Weed, and Fussy Gussy" and its scientific name is Gnaphalium obtusifolium.  An informative article by Matthew Wood on this species is posted on Sunnyfield Herb Farm's webpage, here.

University of Texas-El Paso's website with herb fact sheets give additional information about Gnaphalium's medicinal uses and adds the common name 'mexican mullein'.

Many of the Gnaphalium species are look-alikes, so it is hard to tell which exact species this is just from a visual inspection.  It certainly isn't mullein leaves, which look like this if it is Verbascum thapsus, the common weedy species called common mullein.  Mullein is a member of the family Scrophulariaceae (related to snapdragons), and far removed from the chemistry of the sunflower family Asteraceae.

But, to add to the confusion, the name gordolobo is also used for mullein in Spanish - so, maybe the label isn't wrong but the content of the package?  Wikipedia lists only two species of Verbascum, no Gnaphalium, under the entry "Té de Gordolobo".  It is impossible to know if the producer and seller of this product intended this to be Gnaphalium or Verbascum... problematic to say the least.

So, the name gordolobo is used in Spanish for two different herbals with very different chemistry.  This is why it is important to use not only common names on packages, but also the unique scientific name.  You need to know what you buy and drink and eat, and sellers need to know what they sell.