Lack of appropriate DNA in supplements

[Sherlock]

Yes, I am a very strong advocate for supplements being regulated.

Tart cherry helped me tremendously with mast cells. If you had your way, I never would have obtained that benefit because I never would have went to pay a doc $100 for a prescription each time just to try something new - that would have been $1000s in total. Your way stifles not only freedom but also health.

 

[MeSci]

@MeSci -- Why wouldn't DNA "survive" in saw palmetto, echinacea, allium(actually ALL the allium supplements had allium. One saw palmetto supplement had saw palmetto, the rest none at all), etc. Not one echinacea supplement had echinacea. They are just plants/herbs. Just dried and ground--

Of course the DNA survives..

Google has become slang for "search". Most people use google, but you can use whatever search engine you choose, to research what is currently happening with BOL (barcode of life)

I don't know the exact processes that are involved in producing supplements. Just trying to get facts. It's essential in science - question everything, control for all possible confounding factors, etc. One shouldn't just accept as fact a report by a politician that has the support of two other people, one of whom does not appear to be particularly well-qualified.

I know that people use 'Google' as a shorthand, but it is free advertising for an already-enormous company who sometimes display questionable ethics. I won't give them this.

 

[barbc56]

@MeSci

What search engine do you use. I would love to get away from google.

Thanks.

Barb

 

[adreno]

Actually, DuckDuckGo is a pretty good search engine (not a charity, though):

https://duckduckgo.com

 

[barbc56]

I have no idea if the following is accurate but you have certainly piqued my intrest. I was not aware that the test is controversial. I will try and find more other sources when I get the time but will start with this.

The problem with the investigation, Cohen said, is that the test officials used to analyze the supplements — called DNA barcoding — is not proven to work well in identifying whether a particular botanical ingredient is in a supplement or not.

That's because DNA barcoding looks for a specific fragment of DNA, but the ingredients in herbal supplements are often highly processed — crushed, dissolved, filtered and dried — so that they may no longer contain the particular fragment of DNA that researchers are searching for, making the supplement appear to be mislabeled, Cohen said. But the products could still contain some biological compounds from the original plant.

Danica Harbaugh Reynaud, CEO of AuthenTechnologies, a company that does identification tests to look for the plant species found in herbal supplements and other products, agreed. "My suspicion is that inappropriate methods were used to assess these products, leading to some false-negative results," Reynaud told Live Science. "A lack of DNA ... is not necessarily indicative" of a mislabeled supplement, she said.

Damon Little, associate curator of bioinformatics at the New York Botanical Garden, said that some herbal supplements — particularly plant extracts — contain very little DNA. "In the extreme case, you more or less won't find any DNA in that extract at all," Little told Live Science.

For example, some raw materials for herbal supplements are extracted using solvents, including oil. But DNA does not dissolve in oil, Little said, so when the company takes off this oil layer, none of the DNA would come along he said, meaning the DNA would not end up in the final product that consumers buy.

http://m.livescience.com/49713-herbal-supplement-retailers-controversy.html

Barb

 

[Sherlock]

Actually, DuckDuckGo is a pretty good search engine (not a charity, though):

https://duckduckgo.com

Two other privacy oriented search engines:
https://startpage.com which gives you google results without letting google spy on you
https://ixquick.com/ the sister site to Startpage, with non-google meta search results

With either, you can also visit result pages using their proxy. The proxy does not allow javascript, so it is safer though that makes for varying degrees of being unreadable.

Btw, MeSci has the charity engine she uses in her sig.

 

[barbc56]

Thanks @Sherlock @adreno

I will certainly try these!

Barb
ETA

I missed the search engine in @MeSci's post as I had blocked signatures. I think I will leave this feature on.

 

[boohealth]

Hello all. Go to a search engine and spend the day researching barcode of life (BOL) and draw your own conclusions about whether the technique is valid and accurate.
I saw the attorney general's letter/report. They were just plain old supplements, folks. HERBAL supplements. No sophisticated extracts. I guess garlic is really cheap because the garilc ie allium was fine. One saw palmetto supplement had the herb. All the other supplements had no DNA from the herb listed, but they had filler like pea, rice, etc.

The response by the herbal industry is pathetic. And I do take herbs and tinctures--a few--from companies I totally know and trust. Even so...

 

[Sherlock]

Hello all. Go to a search engine...

That's a big improvement, thanks

All the other supplements had no DNA from the herb listed

Your point is a compelling one: that the technique does seem to work with some, so why not all?

My instinct though, is to wonder how much sympathy should go to some buyer who thinks that there would actually be actual ginseng at Walmart. But then, it could be somebody's mother or grandmother, so I guess it's more appropriate to think of how snakey the industry is in taking advantage.

We might next see some minor debacle like the recent one for RedBull: anybody can go to a website and fill a form to say they bought some of the ripoff stuff to get $10 back, then 10 billion people will do so and nobody ends up getting anything except for the lawyers.

The response by the herbal industry is pathetic.

Yep, they could have done a rush job with some lab that does regular assays by now, to refute or confirm the barcode results. Instead, they'll pretend they didn't suspect the Chinese suppliers were supplying fakery.

 

[boohealth]

Assays and best practice stamps have been available to the herbal industry for years now, but only 1% avail themselves.

My point wasn't if one or all were aduterated--it's that barcoding works and these are plants. BTW, you can find olive DNA in olive oil, so I'd think it's fairly likely you can find DNA from the source in many extracts.

Yeah, don't beat up on the buyers at Walmart, Walgreens, GNC and Target. They were sincerely trying to help themselves.

 

[MeSci]

Assays and best practice stamps have been available to the herbal industry for years now, but only 1% avail themselves.

My point wasn't if one or all were aduterated--it's that barcoding works and these are plants. BTW, you can find olive DNA in olive oil, so I'd think it's fairly likely you can find DNA from the source in many extracts.

It would be really helpful if you could give links/sources for the info you give, as we are trying to establish facts here, not necessarily arguing for one side or the other. For example, do you have a source for "only 1% avail themselves"?

I'm not sure what you mean by "The response by the herbal industry."

I don't know who runs the site that @barbc56 linked to, but the article says, for example:

"There are profound problems with the quality of supplements in the United States," said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who has conducted numerous studies on adulterated supplements. But Cohen said he found the results of the attorney general investigation hard to believe, because single-ingredient supplements — like the ones tested in the investigation — are much more likely to consistently contain the ingredient that matches what's on the label. Cohen said he would have expected around 90 percent of store-brand herbal supplements tested from the stores to contain the labeled ingredient.

"If I had this kind of surprising, counterintuitive results, I would do additional tests," said Cohen. [Wishful Thinking: 6 'Magic Bullet' Cures That Don't Exist]

The wrong test?

One problem with the investigation, Cohen said, is that the test officials used to analyze the supplements — called DNA barcoding — is not proven to work well in identifying whether a particular botanical ingredient is in a supplement or not.

Danica Harbaugh Reynaud, CEO of AuthenTechnologies, a company that does identification tests to look for the plant species found in herbal supplements and other products, agreed. "My suspicion is that inappropriate methods were used to assess these products, leading to some false-negative results," Reynaud told Live Science. "A lack of DNA ... is not necessarily indicative" of a mislabeled supplement, she said.

Damon Little, associate curator of bioinformatics at the New York Botanical Garden, said that some herbal supplements — particularly plant extracts — contain very little DNA. "In the extreme case, you more or less won't find any DNA in that extract at all," Little told Live Science.

So that's three people who are not obviously associated with the herbal industry (although they may be, of course).

The reference to oil used as a solvent does not mean oil extracted from the herb(s), whereas olive oil is - oil from olives, so will inevitably contain olive molecules. Oil as a solvent will have come from different plant species - indeed, perhaps this is the source of some of the 'wrong' DNA found.

 

[adreno]

ConsumerLab test supplements all the time, and I have never seen anything remotely like this report. Mostly it's just a few products not containing the specified dosage. So this makes me wonder too about the test method used for this report.

 

[boohealth]

@MeSci I have a fulltime job so I'm not going to research for free and find links. Just giving my opinions based on my knowledge. these were not extracts. I saw the attorney generals letter. Enough said...this is a diminishing returns conversation.

It would be really helpful if you could give links/sources for the info you give, as we are trying to establish facts here, not necessarily arguing for one side or the other. For example, do you have a source for "only 1% avail themselves"?

I'm not sure what you mean by "The response by the herbal industry."

I don't know who runs the site that @barbc56 linked to, but the article says, for example:




So that's three people who are not obviously associated with the herbal industry (although they may be, of course).

The reference to oil used as a solvent does not mean oil extracted from the herb(s), whereas olive oil is - oil from olives, so will inevitably contain olive molecules. Oil as a solvent will have come from different plant species - indeed, perhaps this is the source of some of the 'wrong' DNA found.

 

[barbc56]

As it turns out this test is indeed valid and internationally recognized. The only criticisms are in the field of taxonomy. The debate is that while the barcode of life is giving accurate DNA results but that it doesn't tell you the species level. See below for more information.

http://www.barcoding.si.edu/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding#Criticisms

Other sources: two research scientists, one in statistics the other in geology.

Barb

 

[barbc56]

DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products

Conclusions
Most of the herbal products tested were of poor quality, including considerable product substitution, contamination and use of fillers. These activities dilute the effectiveness of otherwise useful remedies, lowering the perceived value of all related products because of a lack of consumer confidence in them. We suggest that the herbal industry should embrace DNA barcoding for authenticating herbal products through testing of raw materials used in manufacturing products. The use of an SRM DNA herbal barcode library for testing bulk materials could provide a method for 'best practices’ in the manufacturing of herbal products. This would provide consumers with safe, high quality herbal products.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/222/abstract

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/s...n-not-what-they-seem.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

[MeSci]

As it turns out this test is indeed valid and internationally recognized. The only criticisms are in the field of taxonomy. The debate is that while the barcode of life is giving accurate DNA results but that it doesn't tell you the species level. See below for more information.

http://www.barcoding.si.edu/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding#Criticisms

Other sources: two research scientists, one in statistics the other in geology.

Barb

I decided to look for more info about how the Wikipedia article and its referenced sources related to plants, and found this section:

Kress et al. (2005[2]) suggest that the use of the COI sequence "is not appropriate for most species of plants because of a much slower rate of cytochrome c oxidase I gene evolution in higher plants than in animals". A series of experiments was then conducted to find a more suitable region of the genome for use in the DNA barcoding of flowering plants (or the larger group of land plants).[7] One 2005 proposal was the nuclear internal transcribed spacer region and the plastid trnH-psbA intergenic spacer;[2] other researchers advocated other regions such as matK.[7]

In 2009, a collaboration of a large group of plant DNA barcode researchers proposed two chloroplast genes, rbcL and matK, taken together, as a barcode for plants.[6] Jesse Ausubel, a DNA barcode researcher not involved in that effort, suggested that standardizing on a sequence was the best way to produce a large database of plant sequences, and that time would tell whether this choice would be sufficiently good at distinguishing different plant species.[19]

The source paper for Kress is here. Others can be found from the reference list, as this one was.

Good finds anyway!

 

[barbc56]

This has been a real learning experience. I'm glad you brought up this question.

Here is another source about DNA barcoding from one of my favorite blogs. I have broken the text into more paragraphs to make it more readable.

This sounds another slam dunk for prosecutors and represents the worst possible scenario: fraudulent marketing and shoddy manufacturing with ingredients missing, and other ingredients included, but not disclosed. It’s simply not possible to use supplements safely under these circumstances.

But there’s been an interesting twist: Onemanufacturer and other critics are challenging the AG’s methodology, claiming that DNA barcoding is inappropriate and insufficient to detect ingredients. They stated that the DNA may not survive processing, but that doesn’t mean the original product isn’t there. They also claim that the “contaminants” may be acceptable fillers.

But this doesn’t explain the fact that some tests found product, and others didn’t – even within the same brand. The AG, in response, is pointing to data suggesting that this methodology has been validated. Given the testing was done by a private organization and is unpublished, there’s insufficient information to say. However, even critics of the supplement industry that have looked at the AG’s analysis agree that DNA bardcoding, by itself, may be insufficient. Without more data, and the assessment of experts, it’s impossible to draw firm conclusions.

The root cause here is that there is no evidence these products have any medicinal effects. Without proof they do anything medicinal, we can’t identify any specific active ingredient, nor can we test for it. DNA barcoding can’t do any of this – it can only identify the raw (source) material is present. And that alone may be insufficient

If I'm reading this correctly, it seems the barcoding suggests a problem with the supplements but that's not sufficient to say with 100% certainty that the results are valid. It also doesn't mean the test is absolutely worthless.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/searching-for-the-supplement-in-your-supplement/

Barb

 

[Little Bluestem]

They are just plants/herbs. Just dried and ground--

Of course the DNA survives..

According to the radio report that I heard some were not dried, ground plants, but extracts. Would you expect to find olive DNA in olive oil, corn DNA in corn starch, or tea DNA in my morning cup of tea?

 

[MeSci]

According to the radio report that I heard some were not dried, ground plants, but extracts. Would you expect to find olive DNA in olive oil, corn DNA in corn starch, or tea DNA in my morning cup of tea?

Olive DNA is found in olive oil - see here for example. For other plant extracts it will probably depend partly on the extraction method as to whether much/any/enough DNA is found, and finding much/any/enough DNA will also depend on the method used to search for it. You'll find some answers in posts 54 and 56. It's very complex.

 

[boohealth]

According to the radio report that I heard some were not dried, ground plants, but extracts. Would you expect to find olive DNA in olive oil, corn DNA in corn starch, or tea DNA in my morning cup of tea?

Yes, you do find olive DNA in olive oil, according to a barcoding expert I talked with.
No, they were not extracts, at least not described as such in the Attorney General's letter.