One Third of Herbal Supplements are Fake

An article in today’s New York Times online describes a study of herbal supplements– pills and powders– that found that a third of those tested turned out not to contain any of the purported active ingredient.  Forty-four bottles of herbals were selected at random from store shelves, from twelve different companies.  DNA bar-coding was used to identify any plant ingredients present in the pills.  In a third of the bottles, none of the herb was found; in some of these cases, other herbs or even weeds were identified, and in others only rice (as rice flour), wheat, or other fillers were found.

The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/herbal-supplements-are-often-not-what-they-seem.html?hp

Part of the problem here is that there is minimal regulation of the herbal medicine market.  The purported ingredients are only required to show that they are “safe”, not that they are effective (as prescription drugs are required to do.)  Even when the described ingredient has been shown to be safe, there is no guarantee that it is actually present in the pills that you buy.  Certainly a pill containing nothing but a filler would be quite safe, although its effectiveness could be reasonably questioned.

The other part of the problem is that there is little or no inspection of the manufacturing plants that produce herbal remedies.  Even if a plant were inspected, the absence of any “active ingredient” could easily be missed.  Manufacturers are counting on this lax oversight to cut costs by minimizing their expenses on obtaining the herbs involved.  It is cheaper to fill a pill with rice flour than with an herb.

At this point it would be nice to see a study of generic drugs to find out how much of the active ingredients they actually contain.  I would not be surprised if a significant percentage of generics were similarly mislabeled.