Show #2679
DIALOGUE
The Business of Botanicals
with guest, Ann Armbrecht

Carl Lanore: Welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. 

We're going to be talking about botanicals today. A lot of the supplements we talk about on this show contain botanicals, and there’s a lot we don't know about them. Just like any other part of the supplement industry, there’s good stuff and there's bad stuff. How do you tell and what should you expect? There's a lot of ‘puffery’ that goes on in supplement sales, and that includes the botanical side. 

We're going to get to the bottom of it today with Ann Armbrecht. She just published a new book called The Business of Botanicals.

Carl Lanore: Welcome to the show. What prompted this book? Were you a longtime consumer of botanicals? Did you start to ask yourself the question, “how do I know what I'm getting is really what I think it is?”?

Ann Armbrecht: So I'm an anthropologist by training, so I’m curious about what goes on behind the scenes by nature. I started studying herbal medicine after attending an earth conference, the New England Women's Conference. That made me curious about traditional Western herbalism, so I entered an apprentice program with Rosemary Gladstar and dove in to using herbs, making remedies in my kitchen, and that sort of thing. As I learned more, my husband and I produced a documentary celebrating the values of herbal medicine. As we interviewed people for that film, I became curious about the business of the herb industry. Herbalists talk a lot about the intention of the plants and the importance of their relationship with that plant as part of the healing power. But they would often recommend botanicals that were bought and sold on a global supply chain. I really wondered about that disconnect. That's what motivated me.

Carl Lanore: I think a lot of that is the marketing. The herbal community wants to differentiate themselves from the traditional supplement community where they're synthesizing ingredients. Knowing your customer is an important component of success and maybe that's the holistic approach. You really don't have to know the herbs and have a personal relationship with the plant, as long as it's what it's supposed to be. Is that true? 

Ann Armbrecht: I think herbalists would say that it’s more than that. That a plant is a living entity and that there is a relationship. That's actually what drew me to herbal medicine because I had done my research in Eastern Nepal in an indigenous farming community where they also had a similar relationship with the aliveness of the world. That's what I was interested in exploring: what does that intention or that quality of relationship mean in global supply? Can you have both? Can plants be somehow more than just an object we consume? Even as they are commodities that are bought and sold.

Carl Lanore: Why do we have such problems with these concepts? We've been talking a lot lately on the show about why people find it hard to believe that stress is really a bad thing for them. We tend to choose what we want to believe and what we don't want to believe. Clearly, if you spend any time gardening, you understand that plants really are these living things. They may not be like us, but they are living things that express in ways -  like hibiscus, a tree that we have in the backyard, literally starts to turn towards the sun when we move it to a different area on our deck. That's a level of intelligence. It's undeniable. That plant is not a dumb thing. Maybe it can't build a Tesla, but clearly it has a level of intelligence. Why do you think people have a hard time even accepting that concept?

Ann Armbrecht: That's an interesting question. I think about the quality of a relationship with it. You know, there's often this contrast between Western ways of knowing and indigenous ways of knowing. Indigenous ways of knowing somehow have that sense of respect that we in the west don’t. I don't know that it's so simple. I think it's much more complicated. Just, as you have that relationship with that hibiscus plant, you notice it and its interaction with the world. It's not just this inner object. We all have relationships with places that we really care about that we're not going to destroy. 

Carl Lanore: Personally, I think that we have as a population begun to think that we know better than nature. Proof of that is using formula instead of using breast milk. Now, all these years later, we're like, wow, we've made a big mistake about formula. Every time we think we know better than nature because we're humans, we really mess things up. I really think part of it comes from the fact that we're so desperate to be in control of our destiny and our future. We don't want to think that things are just random. We want to have symbolism. A lot of that has to do with our own desire to fool ourselves into thinking we have control of things so we discount this other stuff. Human trajectory wouldn't be what it is today if we didn't employ magical thinking and think we could do things and then found that we could. Yet, when people hear these types of discussions, many get turned off. If you've lived long enough, you’ve seen evidence of it now, whether you ignored it or you discount it as different story, but we all see evidence of it. I just think we want to be superior and we want to be in control. We don't want to feel like anything else has the wheel besides us. 

Ann Armbrecht: That's really what drew me to herbal medicine in the first place, you know, the Herbal Renaissance came about in the sixties and seventies with the ‘back to the land’ movement and people wanting to grow their own food. And part of that was to relearn this folk medicine; how to make teas and tinctures and herbal oils in your own kitchen with plants you can grow yourself. I loved that. I loved how simple it was to make a tea that I could then give my children, with a plant that I grew. I knew what that plant was. I knew how much I paid attention or not in the preparation. And so it had that esoteric part, but it was quite concrete and practical. It was a way of taking back control from having to go to a pharmacy and depend on what some doctor told me I needed to buy. 

Carl Lanore: I’m a huge fan of a group of books called the Foxfire books. Are you familiar with them? A professor in college gave me mine; Tom Wood. I don't know who it was that went to the Appalachians and learned everything that those people knew instinctively: how to make poultices and cures and medicinal products, even making instruments, dulcimers, skinning and tanning, everything. You could become a survival expert by just buying and learning all the things in the Foxfire books. The irony is these were things that people knew for hundreds of years. They didn't have to read a book. They were taught by their grandfather, their father, their mother, and so on and so forth. Very cool stuff. 

Let’s talk about your book now. When you endeavored this book, did you set out to try to find the dark scary parts of the herb industry?

Ann Armbrecht: Well, first of all, the industry has quite historically been quite secretive and it's difficult to get access in general. So if I started out as an investigative journalist, I wouldn't have gotten very far. I also wasn't interested in telling the dirty dark secrets. I was interested in walking up the line between not being naive about claims that companies made about quality and things like that, but also I feel like the media can paint the industry in very black and white terms. It's either all good or all bad, when in fact it's much more complicated. If I focused a lot on the bad, I felt like that's all that would get the attention. There was one point, early on in the book, I went to Eastern Europe to visit some producer companies. I was showing some pictures later when I came back, because I did a Kickstarter to raise money to do video work around the supply chain, and somebody in the industry said, “Oh, those pictures are kind of dusty. Are you sure you want to show those?” And I thought, well, it is dusty. I did go ahead and show those pictures, but all along, I would kind of check with people who I feel aren't afraid to ask questions about the industry, but they're also not naive about it whether or not they thought I should share this or that.

Carl Lanore: We’ve learned a lot about the botanical industry because of coffee. Coffee has become America's pastime. think it's really destroying many of peoples health. I really think coffee is at the root of a lot of gut problems in the United States. However, we've learned that the quality of coffee means something. We learned the word mycotoxins. How the coffee is handled, as it's transported to the shipping centers of various countries. Does it sit out on a dock? Do birds poop on the burlap? When these questions began to come about, the coffee industry began to strive to produce better quality coffee. I think ginger extract is magic. But the quality of ginger matters. Is it heavily sprayed?How was it handled? Is it exposed to ethyl alcohol?They use, the cellulose, with the ginger so it's super concentrated but sometimes they use methanol and methanol is very dangerous for humans to consume. So you start to think, ‘wow, am I taking a big chance by using a botanically raw material in my supplements and are the companies even paying attention?’. Talk to that a little bit. 

Ann Armbrecht: Those are all really good questions. What struck me in the beginning was less about what's happening in coffee, but more that there's so much awareness around food and where food comes from and how it's handled and how that connects to the quality of it. But there was not that conversation around botanicals. To me it seems even more important because so many people are spending a lot of money to take these products for their health, without a lot of conversation about what you're getting when you buy one herb versus another herb. There’s not a lot of pressure on companies to really talk about how they're making sure it's not meth and all that. It’s the, you know, I'm forgetting the word…

Carl Lanore: The extractors and the excipients that they put in them.

Ann Armbrecht:  Yes and that how they're handled or that the stacks are clean. In general, we're not educated about what questions to ask. Companies can get away with a lot. There are companies who do know that the quality and effectiveness of the finished product is directly connected to the the care and attention all along the supply chain. But they're competing on the shelf with a whole bunch of companies that don't bring that same attention.  I really wanted to elevate the conversation and provide stories and information so that 1) we can all ask better questions and 2) have the companies begin to know we're paying attention. 

Carl Lanore: Another interesting thing is that there are constituents that may occur in a variety of different plants, but for some reason they don't produce the same effects except in this particular plant. One that I'm familiar with is cardamon extracts, which actually can help build muscle. It comes from a variety of different plant sources, but the only plants that seem to be effective are the ones that come from somewhere in Russia. We think of these plants are being endowed with these special powers, if you will. The ground that they grow in has as much to do with what is concentrated in them as the plant itself. Now you start to talk about the quality of a given herbal product versus some new ‘Oh, they decided they're going to grow it here in Montana versus where it originally came from’. And it seems to work better when you get the stuff where it came from. Maybe Montana doesn't have the same stuff in the soil. How big of a roll does where it grows play in the quality and effectiveness? 

Ann Armbrecht: Many botanicals are used because they are found in traditional medical systems in the world like Chinese medicine, based on particular plants growing in particular regions that have been harvested at a specific time. 

Those things are all quite specified in these traditional systems of medicine. So if a company is then going to use a product with a plant that's grown in another place, it's up to them to demonstrate through quality control tests that it has the same constituents. One of the things I really wanted to ask, in this book, in the herb classes I've been in, or when you walk in a grocery store, it's just nettles, right? Elderberry. We have no idea where that's grown. And it seems to me that nettles, grown on an organic farm in Vermont, is a different quality product than nettles wild harvested in Eastern Europe. Not that one is better or worse. If this is holistic medicine, then isn't that part of the whole? The ecosystem, the livelihoods of the wild collectors. Are they just living under a piece of tin, like a lot of wild collectors in the world? Or do they make enough money for a dignified livelihood? How's the health of the soil?

Carl Lanore: A lot of that is now starting to come out because more and more people are looking to produce quality products. We have some manufacturers who are re-elevating this discussion. Then suppliers start to come in to pla. Sabinsa has a C3 turmeric product that is concentrated for three of the curcuminoids that seems to be the magic in tumeric and curcumin. Sabinsa has really been a leader in standardization and quality control on botanicals. There is a botanical herb that people take as an anti-aging product and it is supposed to increase telomerase. When we first discovered it, we standardized it for this particular component that we thought was magic. Years later they found out there were six other components within it that were complimentary, and without them, you didn't get the same benefits. So my question is when we start to look at standardization, do we really know what we're going to do? Shouldn't everything just be full spectrum and not standardized? If the original plant was what seemed to have the magic, why do we even bother standardizing? 

Ann Armbrecht: I'm not an expert on standardization so I can't really speak to that. My bias is more for whole plant medicine. That's extracted in simpler ways. For me writing this book has been a huge educational journey into understanding the rigor of companies like Sabinsa or Modere or Indena. There’s a lot of ingredient suppliers that are doing a lot of research into their methods for extraction. I respect the work that's going into that. It's an industry with such a range, from that simple whole plant, you put whole nettles in a mason jar and steep.. That's where I fall on the spectrum. I think we can make a case when you need something for really serious illnesses. Some of those high quality, maybe more standardized things do have a place. But again, I can't really speak to that. 

Carl Lanore: So about the ecosystem, I had a gentleman from India on the show four or five years ago, when tumeric and curcumin became all the rage, who talked about how all tumeric is not the same. He spoke about the ecosystem. He said in India, lots of vehicles use diesel fuel and if they're growing this stuff along a busy road where the diesel fuel is just atomized by the trucks, there is actually atomized diesel fuel in the air. It comes to rest on the plants and then they pick it and they sell it. So you're taking this tumeric extract and it could have petroleum distillates in it. It could have all sorts of horrible stuff. How do we know as consumers, when I pick up that bottle at my favorite health food store, that every step of the way the powder that's in that capsule has been cared for?

Ann Armbrecht: When I was in India, there were similarly disturbing things. In Eastern Bulgaria, we were driving and someone had spread their dried herbs out on the road so that when people drove over it, it acted as a threshing machine. Certifications mean something - they aren’t perfect, but they mean that there’s a paper trail that goes all the way to the source. There are auditors that are going to come and make sure that somebody is paying attention to where those herbs are grown and what kind of sacks they are stored in. Those are really important things. I saw plenty of places where non-certified herbs were brought in in sacks that were reused and who knows what was in that sack prior. One place in India they brought the dried herbs in reused cement sacks. So there’s that accountability, to provide clean brown paper sacks or whatever kind of sack is appropriate., Other companies that aren't certified organic, have internal auditing practices. 

Personally, there are certain companies that I know and trust are paying attention. I feel like we're taking these products for our health so it's worth doing some research to really find out what company has the practices and philosophy that we believe in. 

Carl Lanore: If you take botanical supplements, which we all do, many of us take four or five different supplements that have botanicals in them. We really don't know what we are getting unless we start paying attention and asking the right questions. 

The book is The Business of Botanicals.
You can get it at SHRnetwork.biz/businessofbotanicals. 

[26:52]

Carl Lanore: There are a lot of big players in the supplement industry, and many of them go to great lengths to make sure that the products they are producing are exactly as the labels claim. We've heard a lot about label claim issues in the past four or five years thanks to groups like EWG and labdoor.com, who randomly test products and put out the results. That shook a lot of companies up and put them back in line. 

I see one of the problems, especially in small botanical companies, being that they believe they are getting quality, they see a certificate - but it may have moisture and it may have microbe counts, etc. So they buy that raw material. Now, anyone who's ever looked at a COA knows it has a ridiculously long expiration date. Clearly if a COA has a 10 year expiration date it’s not the same batch they're selling 10 years later. Wouldn't the simplest thing be for an industry-wide movement to force every manufacturer, big or small to provide third party independent analysis of what's in their supplement, for every new batch. ?

Ann Armbrecht: Sure, but in recognizing that might not happen super fast, there are non-profits or trade associations such as the organization I work for,  The American Botanical Council, that have done quite a bit to raise the standards around clinical research and the scientific foundation of the use of botanicals. However, in the last 10 years or so, the Botanical Adulterants Program, has been creating guidance documents around what the common adulterants are, as well as ways that labs can manipulate the data. What we can do as a consumer in the supplement aisle, is go look at American Botanical Council and see who supports that Botanical Adulterants Program. They’ll know that those companies are probably going to be doing it right and not just letting it slip through the cracks. 

I can't see an industry-wide initiative.

Carl Lanore: The consumer can force that to happen. We vote with our dollars. I buy bottled water from a local supplier in Lexington, Kentucky because I'd rather get my water close, than someplace far off. 

I know this about Aquifer, one day I was standing in the aisle and they have a number so I called. I said, “Do you have any questionable plasticizers in your body?”. Back then it was just BPA, but now it's BPS and who knows what else. They answered my question: “No, we don't use BPA, our bottles are BPA free.”

We now know there are other plasticizers that are just as bad as BPA that they're using instead of BPA. There's a manufacturer phone number on every label. Pick up the phone, call them while you stand there and say, ‘hey, do you depend on the supplier’s COA, or do you analyze every batch of everything you produce and where can I see evidence of that? Is it on your website?”. If the consumer takes a minute to ask those questions, then the pressure becomes real for the manufacturers of these products to do these things, or at least they’ll know there's someone out there that won't buy it. Soon it’ll be many people. That's what happened to high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, the FDA allowed them to rename it six other things. So you still don't know. There's still high fructose. Everybody thinks high fructose corn syrup is gone. It's not. It’s glucose/sucrose syrup, fructose syrup, crystalline something. The FDA gave them a backdoor.

Ann Armbrecht: Exactly. Every company I spoke with says that they will respond to the power of the consumer. Also within the industry, people who are trying to push for more sustainable and responsible sourcing are constantly having conversations about whether the consumer is taking the lead or the industry. Consumers play a huge role, but it can be overwhelming. Take some time to do some research and then ask the company how they're paying their workers, if they're Fair for Life certified. If not, why not? Again, so that they know you're listening.

Carl Lanore: We are a society of cheaper is bette. You go to Kroger's and there's a Kroger brand Swiss cheese, and then there's the Sargento Swiss cheese and the Kroger's is cheaper. You turn them over, you look at them. The ingredients are exactly the same, but I can tell you that the Kroger's is waxier and has less flavor than the Sargento. So clearly there's a difference, even though the label lines up. Tell my audience why they should care. Forget about the humanitarian aspects. The quality of the product. Why they should care, whether or not the guy who's grown this stuff and picking it is being treated fairly. How does that impact what they hold in their hand at the shelf?

Ann Armbrecht: If you're a paid well, you're going to pay a little more attention. You're not going to be trying to cut corners. Economic adulteration has a long history in the trade of herbs and spices; back to colonialism when people would put rocks in a sack of Cassius cinnamon coming from India because they didn't feel like they were being paid a fair wage. A company that is paying a fair wage is treating those workers and they're less likely to be sloppy or careless and have cigarette butts or bits of newspaper or feces. I mean, there's a lot of really nasty things that you don't want in that botanical product. That's one reason you should care. Also, it costs more to have a traceable supply chain. As a buyer, having seen the backend of the botanical industry, I don't want to buy any herbs that are bought on the open market, because they can't trace that down to the beginning. That costs money. That's another reason to pay more for a company that is investing in that paper trail. Then there's the longer term impact. One of the biggest threats to the botanical industry IS urban migration. Unless those farming communities and wild collecting communities can make a fair wage, there's not going to be anyone to do the work. So a short, cheaper product means that maybe in 10 years, there's not going to be a product. Estimates say 60 to 90% of botanicals are wild harvested. Paying more for a product from a company that is investing in making sure that their resource assessments are viable, that the plants are regenerating and not being over harvested, is in your long-term best  interest as well.

Carl Lanore: Chicory finds its early roots in being an adulterant for coffee because coffee beans were very expensive and they discovered that if you put half chicory root and half have coffee beans together, people can’t tell the difference. This happens in taverns too. You ask for the top shelf bourbon, but you don’t realize they filled it up with old Forester and put it back up there. Economics dictate the quality of the product. And that's in every aspect of our lives. You're right. 

[40:11]

Carl Lanore: So, the book was released in February, right? What will my audience come away with clear understanding of when they read your book?

Ann Armbrecht: In he book I take the reader behind the scenes into the encounters that I had so they learn about the steps of the supply chain, where they're sourced, and each step along the way. I’m trying to do that through the perspective of those who are sourcing the plants, what they're looking for, or questions they are asking the challenges they face. It's the story of what it takes to source botanicals on a global supply chain. I believe understanding that complexity can help us be better consumers. Companies won't be able to pull the wool over our eyes as easily, but we also won't be so judgmental and critical of a company that's not perfect. I started this project because I really wanted to tell the stories of the people in places behind the finished product. What happens around the world impacts all of our own health. I believe the first step to being more responsible is to create that empathetic connection with the people on the far side of those products. It's not just us and this product, because when it's just me and a product, all I care about is how that product is going to help me and how I can save money. If I see the people and the places that are impacted, that helps me be more responsible. 

Carl Lanore: Can you share with us any of the encounters you had that really shook you? Were there any events that really took you by surprise?

Ann Armbrecht: I’m not from a manufacturing family, so a lot of the surprise was the scale of mechanization. Some of the really complex, final finished processing is quite elaborate, manufacturing these huge steel vats. That was surprising to me to really understand that aspect of herbal medicine, when I kind of came to it holding hands in a circle in a meadow singing songs. Another thing was learning what to be concerned about and what things not to be concerned about or less concerned about? There's a lot hat's really shocking in rural India. This one trader showed us this huge warehouse of dry dusty plants and he said that's what he would sell to his buyer unless they ask for better quality. If they didn't ask, he wasn't going to give it to them. I could have written a whole book or two on those kind of a stories. I chose to just tell enough of that, to say, this is why you want these positive stories. The positive stories were where people really go above and beyond the bottom line of the work they're doing, because they care for the people who are doing the work and they care for the plants and they care for the planet. I really try and talk about those stories in a way that helps inspire us all to do a little bit more of that.

Carl Lanore: Very interesting. I've never really thought about it before. I mean, I buy supplements that have botanicals in them all the time, and I've never really given much thought to it, but now I will. 

Carl Lanore: The American Botanical Council is a good place for us all to start. If we want to see the manufacturers that are actually producing quality products that are putting a lot of thought into sourcing and making sure that the people they source from are being treated fairly so they're not putting garbage in the plants. 

Ann Armbrecht: Within that, the program that I started is the Sustainable Herbs Program. It’s under the American Botanical Council, but it's a separate website. There is a lot of video content that follow the herbs through the supply chain. We're creating content for companies who really want to be more responsible in their sourcing practices and providing content for consumers so that they can ask better questions of the companies and know what to look for. 

Carl Lanore: Ann, thank you so much for being here today. 

Ann Armbrecht: Thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you.