Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine

Chapter 2 / Herbs and Supplements 19
containing mild, harmless plantain leaves (Plantago major), but they
actually contained the powerful heart drug Digitalis lanata. Proper testing
should have uncovered the problem long before it reached the retail
shelf. The type of testing needed to ensure quality depends on the specific
product.
• Identity: The first essential quality parameter in making an herbal product
is plant identity. This can be verified in whole herbs by botanical
features (leaf shape, types of flowers, fruits, etc.), by microscopic inspection
and by chemical profiling or “fingerprinting.” However, the more
processed the product, the fewer ways there are to test it. A powdered
herb can be tested microscopically or chemically, but an extract can
only be examined chemically.
• Purity: Assuming it is the right plant, the batch may contain some weed
leaves, small amounts of a completely different herb, or perhaps the
wrong part of the herb being purchased, such as hawthorn leaves mixed
in with hawthorn berries. Purity also means freedom from contaminants,
which may include pesticides, heavy metals, dirt, disease-causing
bacteria, mold, or animal or insect contamination, to name a few.
• Potency: Even if it is the right plant and free from any serious contaminants,
is it strong enough to be effective? For the few herbs whose most
active constituents are known, manufacturers can test for those compounds,
but for the many herbs whose active principles are not known,
we can only test for markers or assess potency in some other way.
Reputation and Trust
There are many manufacturers who make high-quality herbal products.
Unfortunately, some product marketers sell inferior products, by
either accident or intentional fraud. It is difficult to generalize about
issues of reputation and trust, because there are ethical and unethical
herb companies of all sizes.
Large companies that are household names have the most to lose from
lapses in quality. However, small companies can also make good products;
many use the same ingredient suppliers as their better established
competitors, and some large companies have faltered on quality. Since
1996, several newspapers and magazines have published exposés on
herbal products based on laboratory testing of products sampled from
retail store shelves. These included The Boston Globe, Los Angeles
Times, Consumer Reports, and HerbalGram, among others. An Internet
publisher, ConsumerLab.com, has also tested retail samples of herbal
products. There have been some problems with methodology in these
programs, because journalists who were unfamiliar with the complexities
of natural products selected inexperienced laboratories for testing.