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

Neutrogena: INCI and scientific species names

Screenshot of Neutrogena Naturals Lip Balm, from Neutrogena's website
(c) Neutrogena, fair use.

Neutrogena properly lists the scientific names of its plant-based ingredients according to the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI). For example, this lip balm lists the ingredient as 'Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea) Butter'. 

Unfortunately, even if these ingredient names are based originally on scientific names of plants, they are formatted differently (i.e., no italics and both genus and species epithet starting with capital letter). Additional confusion arises when INCI does not update their names on plant-derived substances and products when the botanical scientific names get changed or updated. For example, the updated scientific name for the shea butter plant is Vitellaria paradoxa (link, and link). 

Sometimes a species name has changed in the last decade or so due to new evolutionary data showing that a genus has to be have a different circumscription to form a natural group.  That is the main reason why genus names change.  Sometimes it turns out that one species is actually two, or that two species actually is the same species, and then the species epithet change and maybe the genus stays the same.  (See here for a blog post about scientific names in general).

The plant ingredients listed for Neutrogena's Naturals Lip Balm are listed to left according to INCI, and the source plant's scientific name is to the right:

Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) =  Simmondsia chinensis

Sesamum Indicum (Sesame) Seed Oil = Sesamum indicum

Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Oil = Helianthus annuus

Olea Europaea (Olive) Fruit Oil = Olea europaea

Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea) Butter = Vitellaria paradoxa (link, and link)

Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter= Theobroma cacao

See how confusing this can become?  So, if you talk about an ingredient in a cosmetics product you as a consumer or the commercial producer need to follow INCI, and if you talk about the actual plant that this ingredient comes from, then you should follow the most updated scientific plant name.  No wonder the public and companies are confused about plant ingredients, plant names, and plant species. After all, there is a quarter million plants or so to keep track of.

Weleda: Wrong centaury

Weleda is a company providing skincare, health, and beauty products based on natural ingredients and biodynamic principles.  They list their plant ingredients in an online dictionary (more companies should do this, it is an excellent resource), and get their botanical taxonomy mostly correct (with the exception of their capitalization of species epithets).

There are, however, one major mistake, and this is a mistake that is not uncommon.  The common name centaury is used for several unrelated plant genera, most commonly Centaurium (a gentian, in Gentianaceae), and Centaurea in the sunflower and aster family (Asteraceae).

The plant listed as "Centaury (Centaurium Erythraea)", should be Centaurium erythraea, but the photo at Weleda's website is of Centaurea cyanus, so the two genera are also mixed up.  It is simply the wrong species photo with the bitter-tasting Centaurium plant they use in their products.

Centaury, screenshot from Weleda.com

The common name for the blue-flowered Centaurea cyanus is often cornflower, since it is a common weed in grain fields in Europe (corn in Europe is not the same as American corn, that is called maize in Europe). Centaurium erythraea on the other hand is a pink-flowered herb that grows in meadows, roadsides, and slightly wet areas. 

The species epithet should be listed with a lower case letter in the beginning, as 'erythraea'.  Weleda gets this formatting rule wrong for most of its plant species names, but that is easy to fix. For example, 'Arnica Montana' should be 'Arnica montana' in the ingredient list to be accurate.

Common names that are the same for several unrelated species are not at all unusual; examples are snakeroot, hemlock, sycamore, and ironweed. One species can have several common names too, so common names can be very confusing. Only scientific names are unique to a species and universal and the same worldwide.  But more on that in a later post. 

Burt's Bees: Canola oil plant

The beauty and skin product company Burt's Bees gets a lot of their botany fully correct in their online ingredient list, but manage to get one of the most common plant-derived oils listed with a mistake in its scientific name, like this:

"CANOLA OIL (BRASSICA CAMPETSTRIS)" (link)

Canola oil comes from two different plants in the genus Brassica, which is in the mustard family (Brassicaceae).  In this genus are all the common cabbage crops - broccoli, cauliflower, broccoli rabe, white and red cabbage, brussels sprouts, rape seed, kale, collards, turnip, kohlrabi, some of the mustards, and rutabaga.  Through artificial breeding over hundreds of years these plants have been bred into crop varieties for the harvest of their seeds, leaves, roots, flowers, and seeds, respectively.

The two species that canola oil can come from are Brassica napus and Brassica rapa, and B. rapa now usually includes plants previously called Brassica campestris (not campetstris, as listed on Burt's Bees website). Since each species includes many cultivars and crops with a variety of common names, the scientific names have to be used to define the species in taxonomy.

INCI lists Canola oil as being  "an oil derived from Brassica napus L., Brassicaceae, low in erucic acid".  [Note the lack of italicizing the scientific name of the plant.]

Brassica napus. Source: Köhlers Medizinal-Pflanzen, Wikimedia, Public domain.

Canola oil is derived from the seeds, which are black and tiny and situated inside a long capsule. 

The Brassica taxonomy is still a bit uncertain (and messy), but here is an updated list of the species in the genus. Listing canola oil as Brassica campestris is not a major mistake considering the messy taxonomy of these species, but misspelling campestris is definitely incorrect.

LUSH: Kaffir Limes and Lime trees (Example 1-4)

LUSH with its fragrant, colorful, and funky beauty products uses a lot of natural, plant-based ingredients.  They provide excellent information about their ingredients, but still manages to list many species and/or their Latin names wrong in their Ingredient Finder.  Their ingredient list goes mostly by plant names, not plant ingredient names. I applaud their efforts in ingredient transparency, and these examples illustrates some of the issues raised in the blog posts below this.

LUSH gets many species names correct, but here are some examples of botanical inaccuracies when plant species are listed:

Kaffir lime leaf, Tilia europaea:  The photo at this entry shows leaves of the Kaffir lime plant, Citrus hystrix, a relative of the common lime and orange, and in the Rutaceae family.  The text under this entry refers to an European hardwood tree genus called limes or linden trees, that is related to mallows and cotton and in the Malvaceae family. The listed species, Tilia europaea, should be listed as Tilia x europaea (common lime), since it is a naturally occurring hybrid of two wild European species in this genus (a synonym for this species is Tilia x vulgaris).
    This is a complete mix up of two species, one a kind of tropical Citrus and the other a tall tree from Europe. These two species couldn't be more different.  Lime of course, also refer to calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide, among many other things.
    Common names in English are often not unique to one particular plant species, that is why we have unique Latin names for all species. I think that the species used in the products are Citrus hystrix, which has plenty of essential oils of a flavor that are also used in Asian cooking. But you shouldn't have to guess, it should be clear on the company's website.  Here is how different the two species are in leaf morphology:

Kaffir Lime leaves, Citrus hystrix
(Image source: Fatrabbit, Wikimedia commons, CC license)

Common Lime leaves, Tilia x europea
(Image source: Alvesgaspar, Wikimedia commons, CC license)

Blackcurrant, Ribes Nigrum: should be Ribes nigrum.

Flax, Linum Usitatissimum: should be Linum usitatissimum

Indigo Henna (Indigofera Tintctoria): should be indigo, Indigofera tinctoria. Note spelling of the Latin name.  Henna comes from another plant, so the made up common name 'indigo henna' is confusing and doesn't refer to a species, but to a LUSH product.