Herbal Market Is Exploding

Filed under: Dave Carpenter — Copyright©2006 Dave Carpenter @ 9:30 am
by Dave Carpenter, N.D., C. Ac, CCI

Over the last year or so the nutritional supplement market has exploded. Wall Street gurus are getting their clients into hot new companies that market herbal products and many mergers are taking place in order to position companies for this huge market which did close to $15 billion in sales in 1998. To add fuel to the fire, both Time and JAMA featured lengthy articles about the rising popularity of herbal medicine in their November issues.

This has major companies like Bayer, Warner-Lambert, SmithKline Beechman, Whitehall-Robbins and others positioning to market their own line of products. The Time article mentioned that Bayer has budgeted $75 million for promotions introducing their new line. This will most likely cause a shake-up in the industry where many small companies will likely disappear.

I think that the huge marketing campaigns will be both good and bad for most of us. First of all, the increased exposure will create an awareness of herbal products which has been unseen to date on this scale. The problem is, these companies will create “magic pills” for everything, getting the consumer caught up in these fads just like they were with Hormone Replacement Therapy, Prosac, Cat’s Claw, Noni, St. Johnswort, DHEA, colloidal silver, etc… All of these may be good, but they’ve been so heavily promoted as the “magic bullet” for everyone’s problems that many have been discouraged as a result of their own experience with the products. It will only work for you if your body is lacking one or more of the components these contain. If you are following a sensible diet and lifestyle you may not experience any changes at all from these.

It still seems to come down to common sense. If you have a problem, get help from someone who is qualified to help with the problem. Don’t believe everything you see on TV or read in a magazine or newspaper. I recently read an article which discussed childrens vaccinations and how important they are. The next article quoted from JAMA,1998;280:527-532 saying that recent findings conclude that the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine has been proven ineffective when given to children before 15 months of age. It has been given at 6 mos., 9mos, and 12 mos.. Both were well written articles, but the first one sounded like a paid advertisement for immunizations while the second had taken the time to learn the pros and cons, and thus gave much better advise. The interesting thing is that I’ve had several people mention they read the first article and started feeling guilty because they’ve been cautious about immunizations.

The pharmaceutical companies want a piece of the action in the herbal world and several companies have come out with a line of standardized herbal products. Many people have asked me what I think of this and I have to say that it’s good and it’s bad. It’s good because it shows that more people are using herbs and proving again that they work, and it’s bad because many people are not well enough informed to know that “standardization” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Until recently, most of us had two options if we wanted to use herbs. We either grew or gathered our herbs or we bought the herbs in a tea or powdered form (capsules). In both cases we were dealing with the whole herb as nature’s pharmacy put it together so nicely. As more folks learned about herbs the demand grew, as did the profits, and the pharmaceutical companies started to take notice. This is where things started to change.

You see, herbs are not something which can be patented, and that’s where the big dollars are made in the pharmaceutical world. So, to get a share of the market, these companies chose to turn these herbs into “natural drugs” by telling you that there are certain so called active ingredients in the herbs that make them do what they do. By isolating these and extracting them the company now has a “natural drug”. Then they tell you that these work much better than those found in nature because it’s standardized or consistent in it’s makeup of that important ingredient.

I totally disagree with this line of reasoning for these reasons:
* Standardization does not necessarily mean that there is consistency. First of all, there are no standards with which these products are compared to or evaluated by. Secondly, there are companies who add either the active ingredient or a synthesized version of it into a base of ground up substances. The end product may not contain any of the original herb, yet a lab analysis will show that the active ingredients are all there.
* Active ingredients don’t necessarily make herbs effective. A good example of this is the herb St. John’s wort. For years it was claimed that the sole ingredient which made St. John’s wort so effective as an antidepressant was hypericin. Look at a bottle of St. John’s wort the next time you are looking at herbs and you’ll see that most manufacturers of this product still list the hypericin content of their product. Recently it’s been proven that other components such as hyperiform are just as responsible for this wonderful herbs abilities and I think you’ll find more discoveries will follow.
* Standardized herbs are not better or more advanced than whole herbs. This is the most dangerous ploy being used out there because it’s so misleading. Whole herbs have been used for centuries and have a proven track record. Taking one or two active ingredients from them and creating a new product isn’t always so great. Take common aspirin, for example. Aspirin is derived from White Willow Bark. White Willow Bark does not cause gastrointestinal bleeding and some of the other problems which occur with taking aspirin because nature blended it so that other compounds in it temper these tendencies.

Here’s what you need to know. Almost every health food store and pharmacy carries standardized herbal products these days. There’s really no good way to know where the herbs or their constituents came from, how they were processed and how they were standardized. So, it seems to come down to trust. Finding a company or companies which seem to have a higher standard is really the answer. One criteria I use is to look for companies which have been in business producing herbs for several years. Some of the younger companies seem to be in business to take advantage of the exploding natural health market and don’t seem to care that much about quality or consistency. Companies which have been in the herbal business for several years were in it before the explosion and most take pride in providing quality products.