Preventing adulteration and fraud in botanical ingredients in the international marketplace: the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program

The global market for herbal medicines, dietary and food supplements, and other botanically-based natural products has increased, as have confirmed reports of economically motivated adulteration of botanical raw materials, extracts, essential oils with undisclosed, non-authentic, lower-cost ingredients. These adulterated ingredients are used – sometimes by unwitting manufacturers – in finished botanical-based consumer products, reducing the activity and expected efficacy of these products, and, in some cases creating potential safety problems.

Detailed reviews on adulteration of specific botanical ingredients are currently being compiled in a series of publications by an independent consortium of nonprofit organizations consisting of the American Botanical Council (ABC), the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia (AHP), and the National Center for Natural Product Research (NCNPR) at the University of Mississippi. The ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP) is an international educational program that has been supported and endorsed by over 200 botanical industry companies, third-party analytical laboratories, nonprofit professional organizations, industry trade associations, research centers, and others. As of July 2019, BAPP has published a total of 51 extensively peer-reviewed documents. These include Bulletins confirming adulteration of specific ingredients and Laboratory Guidance Documents in which laboratory analytical methods are evaluated for their ability to detect the types of confirmed adulteration currently present in the marketplace. This presentation will give an overview of recent cases of adulteration and BAPP’s efforts to help prevent adulteration and fraud by educating the herb industry, researchers, and regulators via documents available on BAPP’s free-access website at http://cms.herbalgram.org/BAP/index.html.