Health E-Insights: What do you feel is the future of dietary supplements?
Dr. Dentali: The future of dietary supplements includes the recognition of herbal products as viable healthcare options. Mainstream and most professions abandoned plant-based medicines two to three generations ago in favor of potent single actives and later, synthetic compounds designed for specific pharmacological activities. As we better understand systems-biology, we are in a better position to understand the subtle and profound effects such as those caused by ingesting botanical extracts. Recognition of certain mushroom extracts for supporting the immune system during cancer chemotherapy could signal a sea change in the medical community’s view of dietary supplements, for example.
Health E-Insights: How has supplement-relevant science changed in the past few years?
Dr. Dentali: The biggest technological change in analytical product-quality assessment has been the application of software programs that can make sense of complex sets of data. The use of software that can measure chemical differences by careful selection and manipulation of data, so called chemometric analysis, is a very powerful tool that when properly employed can significantly aid ingredient identification and product-quality determinations. Fortunately, the major analytical equipment manufacturers are becoming more involved in the industry. Their expertise will offer considerable potential for solving problems once they figure out what those problems are.
Health E-Insights: What are the industry’s current biggest challenges from a technical point of view?
Dr. Dentali: In some ways industry is just getting up to speed to where it should have been if we hadn’t originally lost sight of the value of natural medicines. I believe there continues to be a need for appropriate scientific expertise applied in manufacturing situations and that product-quality determinations and purchasing decisions must always go far beyond a name, marker compound, and price point. A significant practical challenge is also presented by analytical technologies to teach the instruments what authentic material actually is, and is not, in order to allow differentiation of quality from substandard materials without fail. To do that, sufficient numbers of samples that represent both an appropriate range of authentic materials and similar materials that should be rejected must be acquired, analyzed, and the results evaluated. Finding validated biomarkers for what supplements do in order to better design and inform clinical trials is also a challenge, but that applies to all of current health research.
Health E-Insights: Is there a golden rule by which you live?
Dr. Dentali: The one I learned in Cub Scouts. Leave a campsite in a better condition than you found it. It works better than the leave no trace concept now being taught by the Boy Scouts.
Health E-Insights: What one thing do you want to accomplish by the end of 2011?
Dr. Dentali: Go on another reef dive, prune the fruit trees and buy new high-performance tires for the car.
Health E-Insights: If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you and why?
Dr. Dentali: James Woods, because he’s brilliant, original and persistent. Steve Buscemi, or Giovanni Ribisi as a younger me would also be considered for their quirkiness and the ‘i’ at the end of their last names.
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