A review of the methods used by adulterators in order to fool authentication methods for botanical ingredients has been published in the Journal of Natural Products, the official journal of the American Society of Pharmacognosy.
 
The publication is co-authored by partners of the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP) and is dedicated to the memory of the late botanist and author Steven Foster and ethnopharmacologist Ezra Bejar, both of whom made substantial contributions to BAPP.
 
The publication, titled “Botanical ingredient forensics: Detection of attempts to deceive commonly used analytical methods for authenticating herbal dietary and food ingredients and supplements,” was published online yesterday.
 
It provides evidence of how botanical ingredients are intentionally adulterated to exploit shortcomings in the specificity of commonly used analytical laboratory methods, such as macroscopic and organoleptic identification, UV/Vis spectrophotometry, high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC), gas chromatography with flame ionization detection, and high performance liquid chromatography with UV/Vis detection (HPLC-UV/Vis).
 
The paper was written by Stefan Gafner, PhD, BAPP technical director, and Mark Blumenthal, BAPP founder and director , along with BAPP partners Ikhlas Khan, PhD, of the National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) and Roy Upton, president of American Herbal Pharmacopoeia (AHP). BAPP consulting scientist John H. Cardellina II, PhD, is a co-author, as is Foster.
 
The 12,000 word article is based on BAPP’s peer-reviewed publications and draws from reports on adulteration previously published in BAPP’s Botanical Adulterants Prevention Bulletins, Laboratory Guidance Documents, and Botanical Adulterants Monitor Newsletters. The review has been published with open access.
 
“Throughout history, unethical people have adulterated foods, spices, and medicines,” said Blumenthal, who is also the founder and executive director of the American Botanical Council (ABC). “The explosive growth of the botanical medicine and dietary/food supplement market worldwide has attracted unscrupulous players who are interested more in profit than the health of the users of their ingredients or products. And now some of these fraudsters have gone so far as to manipulate their botanical extracts in such a way as to attempt to fool or trick the prevalent analytical methods in industry and third-party quality control laboratories. Our extensive research has documented this deplorable situation and will be highly useful to ethical industry members, academic researchers, and analytical laboratories in government regulatory agencies around the world.”
 
“Education and awareness are the two most important criteria for identifying adulteration,” said Upton. “A great deal of ‘adulteration’ occurs unbeknownst to the buyer because the tests that are used are inadequate, analysts do not know what potential adulterants to look for, or the adulteration is so sophisticated that they fool even the best compendial or non-compendial tests. This article summarizes more than a decade of BAPP’s experience featuring the types of adulteration that most commonly occur and hopefully will better inform those who want to produce quality products and inspire them to ask the right questions with regard to analytical approaches.”
 
“This review is like the 30-second elevator speech of the work that has been done as part of BAPP over the past 12 years,” said Gafner. “I hope that this will encourage industry members to go to the BAPP website and utilize the valuable resources it contains more widely in order to combat adulteration in the herbal dietary supplement industry.”
 
“We are grateful to the many members of the herb and botanical ingredient industry in the United States and internationally who have supported BAPP’s unique and vitally needed publications. Since its founding in 2010, BAPP has been underwritten or endorsed by more than 200 forward-thinking industry members, trade associations, professional research and health practitioner societies, and many others,” said Blumenthal.