Reading the Stars: Loren Israelsen on Preserving the Past and Navigating the Future of Natural Products

Long before satellites and GPS, Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean by reading the stars, ocean swells, winds, and wildlife, using memory maps based on accumulated historical knowledge. The tradition survived because one generation committed to teaching the next, and the next was willing to listen, learn, and carry that knowledge forward.

In a career spanning more than four decades, Loren Israelsen, president and founder of the United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA), has navigated very different terrain, but has likewise been a dedicated steward of a movement with a deeply rooted heritage.

Israelsen will retire at the end of this year, sunsetting UNPA, the organization he founded more than 34 years ago to secure statutory recognition of dietary supplements as a lawful category of FDA-regulated products.

He and UNPA, known as the Utah Natural Products Alliance until 2005, played a central role in developing, passing, and upholding the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), working closely with leaders like Senator Orrin Hatch, Representative Bill Richardson, and consumer advocates.

Alongside other leaders with similar tenure, Israelsen has helped bridge the earliest ideals of the natural products movement to a marketplace that now serves millions of consumers around the world.

During a retreat in Hawaii several years ago, UNPA members heard from Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, who helped revive the art of traditional Pacific navigation.

One lesson from Thompson hit home for Israelsen: “Ancient wisdom combined with modern tools is the future.”

“I simply pass on (Thompson’s) mantra,” Israelsen said. “Modern tools without the ancient wisdom is equally problematic as the wisdom without the tools. This is not an either-or. It really has to be a synthesis of both.”

Closing One Chapter

The decision to sunset UNPA was not made overnight. “It had been on my mind for a couple of years,” Israelsen said. “But there was always that project, that thing I really wanted to see if we could get over the top on a couple of things.”

UNPA’s priorities for its remaining months include ensuring ongoing initiatives (like its long-running work with China) continue beyond the organization itself, helping members transition to other trade groups positioned to address their needs, and ensuring continued support for its many partners cultivated over decades, including universities, scientific organizations, and other institutions — Bastyr University, the National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) at the University of Mississippi, the American Botanical Council (ABC), the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, and Sonoran University of Health Sciences, to name a few.

A considerate steward, Israelsen hopes to leave the organization as thoughtfully as it was built. “As good Boy Scouts, leave the camp a little cleaner than when we got there.”

Over three decades, UNPA carved out a distinctive role within the dietary supplement industry. Unlike larger organizations representing broad segments of the industry, UNPA developed a reputation for tackling complex scientific and regulatory issues, fostering international collaboration, and convening stakeholders across industry, academia, and government.

A Road of Chance and Choice

One of the industry’s most influential advocates never intended to work in natural products.

“I wish I could say that I had the brains to come looking for the industry,” Israelsen said. “I was running away from something, which was a career in the law.”

After working in Congress for Senator Hatch during his first term, Israelsen went to law school, where he realized early on he was not built to be a corporate lawyer.

He happened to meet the general manager of Nature’s Way at a birthday party, and he soon found himself working part-time with one of the industry’s most recognized legacy companies to help pay for law school.

He still remembers the smell while walking into work for the first time. “They were running valerian that day.”

“I came in tabula rasa,” he added. “But I was fascinated by it. It was so different. People were different. Their ideas. Just everything about it.”

He finished law school and accepted a role as general counsel, beginning a lifelong career in a new world he was still discovering.

History in a Hot, Dusty Attic

One of Israelsen’s first assignments proved formative. The company had little understanding of its trademark portfolio, so he would find himself in an attic sorting through records in jeans and a T-shirt.

“I didn’t think at the time that was a very distinguished way to begin my legal career,” he said. But those records arguably became something more meaningful than legal files.

“That experience gave me an encyclopedic understanding of the history, not just of Nature’s Way and its records, but of the industry up to that point. I think that probably began my lifelong interest in the stories and the history of how we came to be.”

That fascination deepened as he became immersed in the industry, learning from earlier pioneers at events like Natural Products Expo West, which he attended in its second year.

Around the Campfire

“It very often ended up in some room at the Marriott at Expo West in the early days. It was a little smoky in there. But there were a lot of stories being told. I realized this is literally sitting around a campfire and listening to the genealogy of your ancestors being told.”

Those relationships also connected him to people whose own lives stretched back into the earliest chapters of American herbal medicine.

In the early days with Nature’s Way, Israelsen also went to visit herbalists in the Appalachian Mountains to better understand their work.

“I think I’m one of those little leap points where I can actually trace back people who were born in the 1870s and 1880s,” he said. “They knew Samuel Thomson. That takes us back to the beginnings in the 1820s of the American herbal tradition.”

“So I count myself mighty fortunate to have had that kind of direct lineage.”

Throughout his career, Israelsen has held numerous leadership positions, including president of Nature’s Way Products, Inc., vice president of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA), co-founder of the European American Phytomedicine Coalition, and founding member of the International Alliance of Dietary/Food Supplement Associations (IADSA).

He has also served as an advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements, and numerous scientific, academic, and industry organizations.

In addition to many awards and recognitions, Sonoran University recently awarded Israelsen an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa) degree during the university’s commencement ceremony in June.

Israelsen said he felt a “shared spirit, sense of purpose, and common goals” at the event.

“I was reflecting back on the many years of my time in the industry, and the notion that I finally get to graduate. It became symbolic for me in a way. Okay, I graduated, and I can go.”

Changes and Challenges

Every industry must navigate change, especially when success attracts attention and interest from outsiders such as private equity, large consumer packaged goods conglomerates, and opportunistic influencers.

The current industry makeup of a legacy core alongside younger brands, many of which are e-commerce-driven and influenced by AI, presents challenges for education.

Consumer trust with industry, Israelsen said, was established through belief in the stories behind many of the industry’s founding companies, not by trendy marketing campaigns.

“They started because they were medical refugees,” he said. “A family member was sick, went to doctors, couldn’t figure it out … and out of need they searched for something else.”

“I think that is so important for people to understand that the beginnings have been out of need. And will continue to be.”

At trade shows today, “we tend to see a whole lot of protein, a whole lot of collagen, a lot of the same sorts of things,” he said. “The innovation cycle has really become, ‘what’s the other guy doing,’ as opposed to, I would say, the deep internal discovery process.”

“Our consumer base has a different relationship to us. They have stood up and fought for us time and time again over the last 75 years. And that is not to be taken lightly. Our strength, our power, is trust with consumers.”

“And if that is diluted and becomes a fog where you really don’t sense or feel a difference … I think that is a fundamental threat to the industry.”

Don’t become technicians, he added. “Don’t get caught up in the small language. We have to see the very large picture of where the world is going in all respects, whether it’s AI, the broad environmental questions and issues we face, how consumers understand and make their choices in a world where reality is becoming much harder to identify.”

Staying close to consumers is the number-one task for everyone in leadership in the industry, he said. “I would suggest that getting out into all parts of the market and spending time with people in groups you wouldn’t normally think about is exceptionally important.”

Lessons Worth Remembering

The natural medicine movement has had a protracted battle with the government. Considering his discovery of industry history in the attic of Nature’s Way, Israelsen recalled thinking how “improbable” it was to simply survive the government’s suppression efforts.

“The industry had a very rebellious attitude. And I felt then, as I do now, that this is a belief-based community. And what they deeply believed — if it didn’t coincide with the laws of the land at the moment — came first; the laws came second.”

“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” he continued. “We were here long before the Food and Drug Administration was. We meaning the plants, the nutrients, natural medicine, healing traditions that go back thousands of years. And I accepted early on that there had to be a place for this. There wasn’t, and that just kind of seemed wrong.”

But then came the 1976 Proxmire Amendment, spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, which curtailed the FDA’s attempt to classify high-dose vitamins and minerals as drugs based only on their potency.

The amendment laid the structural foundation for DSHEA, but at the time, many advocates thought they had won, and further legislation wouldn’t be necessary.

In 1910 the American Medical Association issued the Flexner Report, a landmark evaluation of medical education that advocated for strict academic standards, heavily restricting opportunities for minorities and alternative medicine.

Hundreds of small medical colleges went out of business, Israelsen said. “A lot of those were women colleges and African American colleges. We’re still recovering from that. The graduating class at Sonoran is about 50 people. I look at that, and my dream is that it’s going to be 500 people. But it took decades to begin to recover from that devastating chapter of our history. If you ask around, nine and a half out of 10 people have never heard of (the Flexner Report).”

Not every lesson from history is inspiring. Some remain cautionary.

Ephedra represents another blight on the natural products industry. While the botanical itself has a long history of medicinal use, FDA officially prohibited the sale of dietary supplements containing ephedrine alkaloids in February 2004 following a surge of adverse event reports.

“We still live with that. We are marked with that as part of our legacy as an industry,” Israelsen said. “Some things leave a vibrational dent in the force,” he added.

While UNPA accomplished its mission of establishing a legal framework for dietary supplements, future challenges loom. But it will be for the next generation of leaders to confront those threats.

“The dietary supplement industry has grown beyond anything we imagined in the early 1990s,” Israelsen said. “Today there are strong organizations, talented leaders, and a new generation of advocates prepared to guide the industry’s future.”

For more than four decades, Israelsen has helped the dietary supplement industry chart its course through legislative battles, regulatory uncertainty, scientific evolution, and extraordinary growth.

As he steps away, Israelsen believes the industry’s future won’t be determined solely by better science, stronger regulations, or more sophisticated technology, but by whether those who inherit it understand why it exists in the first place.

“They will become the storytellers,” he said. “They’ll become the guides. The ones, I think, who can read the stars.”

And when “everybody’s GPS stops working one day,” someone will need to remember how to navigate.