Season 4, Episode 7: Quality Control in the Supplement Industry with Élan M. Sudberg

Evelyne: Thank you for being here. We will be talking about the supplement industry, quality of supplements, testing of ingredients and how that’s done and so much more. Elan and I officially met at Expo West this past year, though I’ve been aware of Alkemist Labs for a long time and I’ve been following you for a long time as well. Recently, Designs for Health sent out a newsletter sharing results from random third-party quality testing that Fullscript actually did on Prenatal Pro, the prenatal multivitamin. The email contained the certificates of analysis for microbiology, residual solvents and heavy metals and, of course, Designs for Health passed those tests with flying colors. I noticed that the tests were done by Alkemist Labs, so it is one of the third-party labs that we use. So, this is a little different from our usual episodes and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Elan: Likewise.

Evelyne: So, before I read your bio, what is lighting you up this week?

Elan: On a personal level, I just got my second stripe in jujitsu, so I’m super excited about that.

Evelyne: Amazing.

Elan: It happened today and that’s been a new interesting personal journey. On the business ends, just making just great progress in the industry as the biggest little lab. So we’re excited to, we just finished MBJ Summit and riding high from that wave still.

Evelyne: I love that. That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing. Elan Sudberg is CEO of Alkemist Labs, a passionately committed contract testing laboratory, specializing in plant authentication, botanical ingredient identification and quantitative analytical services to the food and beverage, nutraceutical and psychedelic industries. He holds a degree in chemistry from Cal State, Long Beach and has authored numerous articles on phytochemistry and analytical techniques for the natural products and nutraceutical industry. He’s on the executive committee of the American Herbal Products Association Board, on their Education and Research on Botanicals Foundation Board, was founding chair of the Cannabis Committee and chairs their Psychedelic Plants and Fungi Committee. His contributions to the industry have been honored with multiple awards, including the Nutrition Business Journal Award for efforts on behalf of the industry. Amazing. First of all, how did you get into this? What is your story?

Elan: It’s kind of a long story because we’ve been doing it for a while, but I’ll try to make it as fast as possible. Born into this, mom was a microbiologist, dad was a chemist, so I basically grew up in laboratories and clinics. My father shifted over to chiropractic, acupuncture and herbal medicine and so my garage was not filled with cars and tools, it was filled with herbs and bottles and hydraulic presses and grinders. So, he made the tinctures in the garage and that’s basically how I grew up with the garage like that.

And at some point in time, around 1996, ’97, I’m just exiting high school, he wanted to do some internal quality control beyond just looking and smelling and tasting the plants. And so we looked at some stuff under the microscope. Used my mom’s microscope. We had a microscope in the house and she was a microbiologist and we failed some materials, went back to the vendor, they were perplexed, took our reports, went back to where they got it from and they sent samples for testing. We were not a testing lab, we just had a lab and a very rudimentary technology to do it as well. Light microscopy goes back to the, I think, 1600s. And so, basically they wanted us to do some more testing and we did it just kind of as a kind favor and then their vendor asked us to do more testing and more testing, and suddenly we were functioning as a testing laboratory.

And what sparked curiosity is my father was a chemist. Funny story is I cheated my entire way through high school chemistry. So, here I am now running the world’s biggest small-plant chemistry lab. To fast-forward, we decided to shift into just testing and stopped manufacturing those tinctures and that was back in 1997, almost 20 years ago though, and have advanced since as the lab who handles all the plants and fungi testing for purity, potency and contamination.

Evelyne: That is so cool. What an amazing story. And I love that you’re a family owned company, actually like Designs for Health. And the story you’re telling actually reminds me of how Designs for Health was founded. One of our first episodes of the podcast was with our founder, Jonathan Lizotte, and he told the story of how Designs for Health started as a nutritional counseling business and the nutritionists were using carnitine but not getting the expected results in their clients. And so they sent the carnitine out for testing and it turns out there was no carnitine in it, so they said, “We need to make this ourselves.” And so Carnitine Tartrate was officially the first Designs for Health product created. So, that’s interesting. It’s sort of a similar story.

Elan: You had to do what you did.

Evelyne: Exactly. And here we are now, Designs for Health and Alkemist Labs. It’s amazing. Something that consumers frequently hear, and I think it’s repeated in the media, repeated by practitioners even, is that the supplement industry is untested, unsafe and unregulated. Can you dispel that for us? And why is that myth still so pervasive?

Elan: It is a false narrative that is perpetuated almost daily with these scandal-like headlines that dietary supplements are, one, unregulated industry, which is completely false. That we are a unsafe industry, which is almost mostly false, and I’ll share data on that in a second. And then that we are untested, which is also false, I would say mostly false. To the safety, a gentleman named Rick Kingston has a safety recall company that basically handles recalls, and he represented some data a little bit ago, I think a year or two ago for AHPA, American Herbal Products Association. He showed this pie chart of all of the FDA-regulated categories, medical devices, animal products, food, drugs and supplements. And the dietary supplement industry holds 3% of that pie chart for recalls and 1% of that 3% was actually drugs masquerading as herbs. So, we actually only have 2% of that pie chart as far as recalls, which don’t actually mean unsafe, that just means the consumer had some sort of issue and they went back and they figured it out.

So, to the safety, we are the safest of the FDA-regulated industries. We are absolutely FDA-regulated and have been so since the DSHEA, but also most recently in 2007, they distributed their GMPs, the Good Manufacturing Practices. So, they gave us rules again in 2007, which the whole industry is supposed to comply with. So, I believe it’s perpetuated by the opposition of the natural products industry. While I’m more than happy Western medicine exists and if and when I need it, I’m grateful. And I’ve had friends and family survive cancer because of it and so, thank you so much for all that. But I personally believe that we are a disruptive industry. We are alternative medicine, as we were called, which is sometimes witchcraft and snake oil, but the fact is nature provides us with lots of tools between plants and fungus and all the above, and it’s there to supplement a diet.

We’re not taking these things to, we’re not supposed to say it’s not here to prevent, cure and treat an illness, but the fact is we all know in this industry we’re trying to do that, but they’re designed to supplement a healthy lifestyle and supplement a healthy diet. And together with those things, I’ve personally stayed not sick for at least six years. My wife and kids pass things around, I don’t get it. I’ve moved right past it, which I attribute to the grip of supplements that I usually take morning and night. I’m not a medical professional and I’m not practicing medicine here, but I truly believe that the Texas sub-industry has a lot to offer that is very disruptive to pharma. It’s no secret that pharma is one of the biggest payers of mainstream TV advertisements and news sources. News is no longer news, it’s more commentary. And so there’s definitely a movement to really tarnish the industry that we try to serve and perpetuate.

Evelyne: You mentioned DSHEA. I think not everybody might be familiar with that. So, that’s the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Can you talk a little bit more about what that is and what that means for practitioners?

Elan: Yeah, so I’m definitely not an expert on it, but I’m definitely, we are all benefiting from it. And I was recently quoted that if Alkemist Labs had a grandfather, his name would be DSHEA and our parent would be GMPs. DSHEA really helped this industry stand aside from being regulated like drugs. And it basically gave a narrative to professionalism that was the Dietary Supplement 30 years ago that the industry was potentially, or it was professional, had a lot of potential to it. So without that, the hard work from the folks behind DSHEA, Lauren Isleson primarily is the one I think of when I think of DSHEA. This industry was perpetuated into more professional setting rather than sitting with witchcraft and alternative medicine in a sense. And so there’s a lot of talk about it renewing DSHEA or doing a new version of it. But again, we all owe the people behind that and that law that passed great gratitude because we wouldn’t be sitting here today doing this podcast without it.

Evelyne: Right, and helping a lot of people in the process.

Elan: Absolutely. Yeah.

Evelyne: I know that that’s something that I experience when I go out into the field and talk to practitioners and just hear the stories that their patients experience with supplements. I’d love to get a little deeper into testing. I think that most practitioners are aware when we make a product or when any supplement company makes a product, we get all the raw materials that go into that and we test every single raw material to make sure that the supplier who gave us that material, that it actually contains what it says it contains, and we test it for so many different things and then we create the product and then we also send that out for third party testing, which is what you do. So can you talk a little bit more about the different kind of tests that would be done on raw materials?

Elan: Sure. At Alkemist Labs we specialize in plants and fungus. We do not test vitamins, amino probiotics. And so I’m going to speak specifically to that area. When you go to the grocery store and you pick out a cantaloupe, you see it with your eyes, you pick it up, you do a tap test, if that means anything, you might smell it, you might feel it. And so those criteria that you’re doing in your head are testing for quality. Your eyes identify cantaloupe versus eggplant. So, test number one, a visual inspection. And then you pick it up and you make sure it’s not rotting. And so there’s a lot of ways that we already do plant analysis every single day. It’s very easy for a toddler to identify a strawberry from an orange, that’s just a visual inspection. And so, one of the first tests that exists on earth is something called organoleptic, which basically you’re looking at something, you’re smelling it, you’re feeling it, you’re observing how it breaks, those types of qualities.

This industry does not trade in whole, fresh fruit or whole, fresh herbs. So, it usually shows up as a tea cut at best or powder or an extract of that powder, which is another way of looking at it is it’s like you make coffee in the morning, you grind up beans that have been roasted. You can identify coffee powder because you can smell it, but once you powder it, you no longer see the beans. And if you go further back, you don’t see the cherry from which it came. And so you make your extract with hot water and now you have a brown liquid. There are other things that could produce a brown liquid, but you smell it and you taste it and you say, “This is coffee.” And so now we’re basically removing data from the strawberry to a dried strawberry, now powdered.

There are red powders from a lot of fruits, so to identify a powder you can no longer use your eyes and your nose and your mouth when it’s especially it’s an extract material. So a lot of people get hung up in that phrase like it’s some big chemical experiment. But coffee is an extract every single morning we make one. Tea is a hot water extract. So, when it’s in the form of a powder, you can no longer do organoleptics, so you have to do things like botanical microscopy, which is as simple as it sounds. You’re looking at a sample under the microscope. It has to be raw material, cannot be an extract because extracts are liquid. It’s coming from the plant. They should have a lot of cellular characteristics. But one of the first techniques this industry deployed, this goes back to the 1800s, and I’ve got some books right here actually.

Originals are basically botanists looking at plant powders under the microscope. And amazingly, the beautiful plants behind you all have different surface features. There’s waxy, there’s fuzzy, and those are all characteristics that if you were to take each one of those and powder them, dry them, powder them, we can identify them from each other. I’m almost 100% certain that there are closer related species like spearmint and peppermint that are hard to differentiate in other licorices, but for the most part, we test almost 2000 plants and for the most part, we can identify down to the species level based on microscopic cellular features, hairs, stomates, cell types, cuticles, fibers, crystals.

Now, back to that extract, when you extract that material like you do coffee in the morning, the brown liquid does not have cellular material in it. So, now you can’t look at the microscope and all you have is basically a liquid and in some cases that liquid is powdered and it gets more complicated and more complicated as you now add things to it or mix it with other ingredients. But now we go to identifying that material for which we use a technique called high-performance thin layer chromatography, so HPTLC. And basically, if you’ve seen a CSI show and you see someone doing genetics on the murder versus the victim, and you see the proteins are bands in the genetic test, and we all look at it like we’re experts and say, “Yeah, that’s definitely the murderer.” and the show continues.

Well, instead of proteins, plants have plant chemicals and fungi has fungal chemicals and so we do HPTLC, to make this not a chemistry lesson, it basically separates chemicals and presents them in a form that can be repeated in the form of a fingerprint. And so we basically take your sample that’s in question compared to our known samples, our control group, and strawberries have a fingerprint, and grapefruit has fingerprint, and echinacea, angustifolia has a fingerprint that’s different from purpurea, and every botanical in this industry has a chemical fingerprint from a particular fraction. And we can use our control samples to compare and contrast those to say, yes, you have ashwagandha root versus ashwagandha root with leaf as an example. So, that’s identity.

Also required is potency, like how strong is it? And especially when you make a claim on your bottle that it has 6% caffeine or 25% resveratrol. Now we’re basically going further. We’ve identified the plant based on these components, just presence. But if you want to know how much it is to really determine how strong your product is, caffeine is a great example, that too much caffeine is not a good experience. Not enough caffeine is also not a good experience, but too much is a health hazard. So, you want to make sure you test your green tea products, your various other caffeine components containing tannicles. We do that with a technique called HPLC, High Pressure Liquid Chromatography, which is a similar job as the HPTLC, but instead of doing a fingerprint, really focusing down on a particular fraction within the fingerprints. So, caffeine is a xanthine kind of a category of chemicals that you’ll find in chocolate and in green tea and yerba mate, one of them is caffeine, theobromine, theophylline.

So you’d run a xanthine fraction test to make sure you’re looking at just this fraction. There’s a lot of other chemicals in green tea, and I say chemicals, phytochemicals, but were you to measure the caffeine, you’d focus on a very specific fraction and you run that sample against a known standard. So now, instead of we’re comparing it to green tea, green tea to green tea, we’re saying we’re comparing green tea to a fine chemical of caffeine. The equipment will basically calculate the quantity of caffeine in the reference standard, the pure form, and compare that to what it sees in your sample and allow you to say X percent caffeine per Y weight of material. So now we’ve got identity and potency. And you can do that in different ways. Fish oils or volatiles are done with the gas chromatography. And again, I’m not going to go into chemistry class here, but same kind of thing, separation and detection.

Last but not least, required by law to defy all those who thinks it’s not, is heavy metals, pesticides, residual solvents and microbiology. Heavy metals are obviously metals that should not be above certain limits in our food, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, there are others. Some of these are picked up by the ground, just natural occurrences in the soil. Some are picked up through treatment and processing. And the laws are very clear what you’re allowed to have and what you’re not. And it’s a very simple straightforward test. The other one is pesticides. Obviously there’s, I think, 3 or 400 that we test for, and it’s a moving target. We see a lot that shouldn’t be there, unfortunately. And again, when you work with organic materials, you don’t see that. When you work with not organic materials, there are limitations of what states and countries allow, but we get samples in this industry from all over the planet and so it gets complicated there, pesticides.

Residual solvents is basically leftover chemicals used in the extraction. So I mentioned earlier how you would use hot water to extract your coffee, you could use alcohol, you can use vodka, you can use toluene, acetone, hexane. It really depends on what you’re trying to pull out. Water pulls out the xanthine, which is why we’re grateful for it in the morning. But if you used hot milk to extract your coffee beans, I don’t think you get the product you’re looking for. But there are laws around how much leftover solvents are allowed to be there, and that’s what residual solvents is about. And then last but not least, microbiology, we’re all familiar with that, with foodborne illnesses, yeast, mold, coliforms, salmonella, and all their friends, there are very clear laws given to us by the FDA about what is allowable limits in our foods and in our supplements.

And so now we offer basically the identity, is it what you think it is? Potency, how strong is it? And then contamination, how much bad stuff is in it? And of course there are limits for all of those things. There’s nothing is clean and clear of anything. These are all natural products. They grow in the soil with other plants and bugs and birds, so you occasionally get spikes. But these types of tests are absolutely critical to make sure that the products that this industry is selling are safe and effective to defy that narrative that we are not tested and not safe and not regulated. It’s complete garbage.

Evelyne: That was a really, really interesting and thorough answer. Thank you so much. And I did not like chemistry in high school. I tried to avoid it as much as possible in college. I liked nutritional biochemistry, but this kind of chemistry, this is actually interesting. If it was like this in high school, I might’ve paid attention.

Elan: Well, I shared earlier, I did cheat all the way through high school chemistry and I was punished by the universe to start a laboratory and go get a chemistry degree. The person who helped me get through high school chemistry and I still chat, she works for a big big-farm zoo company, and we still chat, kind of joking that it’s such a surprise that here I am running a chemistry laboratory, but it makes sense when you break it down to my C minus chemistry level, the bits and pieces come together and make up all of this beautiful industry that we thrive from and love.

Evelyne: And I think that hearing this should also be, I don’t know, maybe a relief to practitioners or just knowing that they can assure their patients or their clients that they can trust the product if it’s a legitimate company that does exceptional quality testing.

Elan: Right. Right.

Evelyne: Can you go a little bit into DNA testing more specifically for specific products?

Elan: Sure. DNA is an interesting topic. I’ll share from the beginning, I’m not an expert in it. It has been known in our industry as an available tool, obviously, maybe not obviously, an example would be in animal DNA testing it’s different because an iguana and a dog can’t reproduce. And so you basically get different types of iguanas, different types of dogs as an example. Humans have human DNA and it’s pretty straightforward because those types of creatures don’t intermix so quickly and prevalently, hopefully. But plants are promiscuous. They like to share. And so apple and pear will figure it out eventually, and there’ll be an apple-pear and strawberries and grapefruits will sort it out eventually. Plants are promiscuous creatures and so their DNA is complicated. And my suspicion is that if you actually did look at the depth of genetics, you’d find out that a lot of things are not actually what they are saying they’re supposed to be.

Not a problem and that’s the problem that the DNA, in my opinion, goes too deep, that our industry needs. Genus and species are important, but the genetics go so far deep that when it was sort of showed up in our industry. And just a reminder, when it showed up by force in our industry, it was in the background in academia, but former and disgraced Attorney General Schneiderman decided to wake up with a thing for our industry. We hired a herpetology genetics expert. So remember, lizards are pretty straightforward. Lizards and frogs DNA is straightforward, plant DNA is very complicated because they’re constantly intermingling with each other. He hired this person to do tests off the shelf and he picked extracts. So remember, earlier I said, “Plant extracts don’t have a lot of plant fibers in it. Almost none in some cases.” And that’s where the DNA lives. So if you’re testing extracts for DNA, you’re not going to find any because they don’t exist.

And they turn it into a smear campaign. The New York Times ran with it and said the whole industry was garbage, and a lot of companies got in trouble, and CEOs got removed, and it was a tragedy in our industry. And unfortunately it was all based on, what we later figured out, fraudulent science. So, there was an individual behind a lot of this technology, and now about 10 years later, the papers that he wrote for which a lot of this industry used as a method to analyze their samples was a fraud paper. Basically, people came out and said, “This is false data. We didn’t actually produce this data. This was all compiled.” And he’s been sort of disgraced. And so now you move forward 10 plus years after that, whereas DNA now, it’s still being used, it still has a really great place in this industry because it does go deeper than the chemistry techniques do.

It’s important for probiotics. I know it’s being used extensively there. But for plants, it’s confusing because, as I mentioned, echinacea and angustifolia is probably, not angustifolia, it’s angustifolia hybrid XYZ, and it constantly moves and changes. So if you were to take that magnifying lens to the whole industry, you would probably discover that labeling is an issue. Not a safety hazard, because at that level, there’s generally no issues. In these close related species, the way it goes with botanists, they go out in the field and they identify things based on the macroscopic features, but the chemicals could be the same inside. We see that in some species that they’re chemically are synonymous, but the botanists decided to name it two different things. And so, it has a place in our industry. It had some really false, some bad early steps because it was, again, it was forced out as a new technology, unproven, untested, forced upon the people, and then you were basically required to do it to stay in this industry.

And then, poof, it went away like it never existed because it didn’t work. And we actually, by popular demand, we’re requested by our clients to start doing DNA testing. So we sunk about a half a million dollars of equipment into the lab to do DNA, and we spent three different teams trying to make it work and we could not. And eventually after about a million dollars total in, we sent the equipment back and scrapped the whole project. That was maybe five years ago, four years ago. And now, fast-forward another four years, and we found out that it was all, now I know why it didn’t work, because the paper for which we were doing this all was fake, basically.

Evelyne: Wow, that’s so crazy.

Elan: Yeah. So my lesson, again, not to get too crazy conspiracy like, but don’t trust the science, never trust the science, challenge the science. And you should always have that right to say, “I don’t think this looks right. Tell me more.” And if someone is not willing to disclose methods behind their science, that’s a problem. And so to me, challenge science should be the moniker and not trust the science. Because we were forced to trust that science by the Attorney General, and he went after Target and Walgreens, and these are big brands that have to very quickly pivot to comply, with not enough time to even have a conversation, to say, “Okay, fine, we’ll do DNA testing on our stuff.” And they did, and now they don’t.

Evelyne: Yeah, I remember when that happened, and I also remember, wasn’t it just a few months ago that the article was retracted? And I thought, “Oh my gosh, nobody heard about the retraction, I’m sure.”

Elan: Of course. And I wrote about it on LinkedIn and I talked to Mike Archibald, who was the former CEO of GNC, who was hit the hardest, and he fell on his sword for the whole thing. He said, “Okay, we’ll do all the tests. We’re already doing all the tests. We’ll take on DNA.” And then of course, his costs went through the roof and the board of directors weren’t pleased with things, and he was invited to leave. And talking to him just recently, I saw him actually last week, he feels vindicated because he was right and his products were good, and his beautiful, amazing brand of GNC was tarnished because of this false story, which has now sort of gone away. So attorney general’s gone, that technology is kind of being reconsidered and he should still be at the helm of GNC. But the people spoke.

Evelyne: Interesting.

Elan: But that was a massive debacle on the lesson is to challenge the science. And if there’s a new method, no one should be above transparency. We should all be able to… When you’re learning chemistry in class, you don’t go to the class and say, “Trust me, professor, these are my numbers.” You show the calculations and the chromatographs and the results. Somehow this industry likes to use the phrase proprietary and confidential, which really needs to stop.

Evelyne: I want to go back to, you know what you were saying on our Monday meeting about, you were using caffeine as an example and going back and back and back with the DNA? And at one point, my recording stopped when you were talking earlier, and I feel like I tuned out for one minute, but did you explain that part, the story that we all liked?

Elan: Oh, so I was talking like re-extracting, re-extracting, re-extracting?

Evelyne: Yeah.

Elan: Yeah. Yeah. So I can speak to that. Yeah. So one of the things that HPTLC, High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography, does that DNA, as an example, does not do. DNA will, say, indicates the presence of an ingredient. So, you can basically have all of your houseplants ground up into a powder and DNA can probably identify each of all those. If you happen to toss in a little bit of hot dog in that powder, I’m not kidding, DNA would say, “Oh, we found hot dog. Your houseplants are adulterated with hot dog.” Well, it doesn’t talk about quantity, it just says presence, right? It’s a yes or no. And so you basically have hot dog in your houseplants. And this example I’ve used is not false. They actually found houseplants and hot dog in samples in our industry because my suspicion is there was a houseplant in the lab or the chemist had a trace of hot dog on their hand. I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense.

We know our industry is not adulterated with hot dogs. So HPTLC, hopefully not, but HPTLC would see that. And so the beauty of HPTLC is it gives these chemical fingerprints and from the prominence of the bands, like the bands in the DNA, you can assess quality. And so the example I like to use is you make, one of my favorite things to do in the morning is make my double shot of espresso and I go downstairs and I grind my beans and have my machine and I run it. And then sometimes I’m thinking, “Maybe I should have a second shot,” so I’ll grind them again. But if I were to keep that same, I don’t know what the cartridge is called, as the thing, the thing, the heavy thing with my espresso beans in, if I ran that one more time, my coffee would be less brown, and if I ran that again, my coffee would be less brown and so on and so forth, until a basically clear liquid emerged because I’ve basically extracted all the things from that little wad of ground coffee beans.

And so DNA would perhaps detect coffee in all of those examples, but it would not detect the quality. And obviously if you’re going to make a second batch of coffee from that previously extracted wad of coffee grinds, you’re not going to get the same espresso experience as you would from the first batch. So, that’s one of the nice things about HPTLC is it can show the quality. And when people ask me like, “Hey, what are we finding the most of in this industry?” It’s not rat poisoning and hot dog in houseplants, it’s just dilute material.

Evelyne: Interesting.

Elan: So we can very quickly and easily see that a sample has been, there’s a lot of reasons why something would look dilute. Back to that supermarket example, when you tap on that cantaloupe, if you didn’t hear that nice echo sound or whatever variable and you took it home, it might be a dud cantaloupe. In fact, I had one last night, had some last night, and it was crunchy and it was not sweet, because there’s nothing going on. It’s still cantaloupe. Genetics would say, “Yes, cantaloupe.” Your mouth says, “This is not a good cantaloupe,” but it looks like cantaloupe, tastes like cantaloupe, and you’ve had better cantaloupes. So quality, my tongue is basically doing the quality check of whatever parameters, sweetness and things like that. So you can’t do quality with DNA, you can say identity only. And so by itself, it’s not a great technique.

And this really brings up the topic of this word orthogonality, which is basically using multidisciplinary techniques to assess the quality of a thing. A good healthcare practitioner doesn’t look one thing on your body. It does tests, blood tests, asks questions, there’s some leading questions for them to assess what you’re dealing with. And an analytical chemistry lab assessing the quality of a plant or a mushroom would do the same. Caffeine does not make coffee. Coffee has a lot of things in it, has caffeine in it. So if all you’re looking for is caffeine and theobromine and theophylline and you have those three peaks in your HPLC and you’re like, “Good to go, we’ve got coffee.” No, you have three chemicals maybe on sawdust. And that same thing would perhaps trick that test. So, this is why we love HPTLC because it shows a lot more than just those three bands. It shows a fingerprint with maybe 15 or 16 or sometimes 25 bands that will match or not match a control sample, which is basically what it should be, the reference library.

Evelyne: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I know that, at Designs for Health, when we get raw materials, and it is one of the reasons why we use a lot of trademarked materials because they’ve been standardized to a specific constituent, but then we still want to make sure that what we get from the raw material supplier is actually what they say it is.

Elan: Exactly.

Evelyne: Speaking of that, there are a lot of materials that we reject, or I wouldn’t say a lot, I would say it happens throughout the year that we reject certain materials because they don’t pass our specifications. And so I’m curious, just from what you’ve seen in this industry, what are raw material ingredient suppliers or manufacturers trying to get away with? And is it that they’re trying to get away with something or is it just that it’s not a good quality material?

Elan: Yeah, so that’s a great question. Doing this for 28 years, I’ve seen a lot. And early in our career, in my career, we did see what I experienced as intentional adulteration and usually economic adulteration is what we would call it. There was an ingredient called Hoodia Gordonii. It was a South African grown succulent. Took six years to grow to maturity before its actives were present. It was an endangered species, and it only grew in very small parts of South Africa, and it was for weight loss. So you can imagine the hype for that category was enormous. And so we saw a lot of material coming to the states, coming to our lab, being tested for Hoodia that was just full of maltodextrin and starch or other cactuses.

In addition to barely getting a C minus in college chemistry, I earned a C in botany. College and tests wasn’t my strength, but got through it. But I even know that you can’t plant the seed of an apple here in the states and grow an apple, then you plant it in China and grow a pear. It’s not how it works. But the industry was being told that if you take South African seeds for Hoodia and you grow it in China, it grows into a different type of cactus, which again, with my C minus in botany I said, “No, that’s not how it works.” You need millions of years to evolve plants from one to the other. So, that’s an example of economic intentional adulteration. What we see these days is probably mostly a function of picking herbs too soon. So back to that cantaloupe that wasn’t ripe, still cantaloupe, genetically still cantaloupe, legally still cantaloupe. Is it good? No.

And so if you pick a plant too soon, it doesn’t have all the constituents. If you dry it too hot, constituents go bad. If you let it mold. So, those are the kind of accidental things that occur maybe in haste if they’re just rushing through it. Also, these plants are grown in nature, and so there’s no single plot of land that has one single plant. So even if they’re trying to do a monocrop, there’s still little tiny weeds growing in there and we occasionally see those show up under HPTLC and microscopy. There’s limits of acceptance for a lot of the botanicals and the reference monographs. We do see a lot of, with the lockdowns in the last few years, elderberry became a very popular ingredient for its immune system benefits. And so that still is the number adulterator we see in this industry. There are people making great efforts to trick people, but it’s very easy to determine. And a good company, a good brand, with good labs can very quickly rule that out.

But for the most part it’s not, no one’s trying to sneak in poison or hot dog. It’s generally just poor quality because they rushed it. Your steak was cooked too hot, still steak, they were trying to get it out too fast. So, it’s well done, it’s not what you wanted. Or too rare. I’m not sure which side of the steak you are on, I’m a rare guy, but I would return an overcooked steak before I would return an undercooked steak. But it’s not as bad as the media makes it seem. It really isn’t. And what we see, and we’re testing thousands, thousands of plants and mushrooms each month, and the failure rates are not impressive. It’s nothing really exciting to share.

I should state that Alkemist, and this is self-bragging because we’ve earned it, but we have some of the best brands in the industry. So, the brands like Designs for Health or other brands that use Alkemist are the best brands in the industry. So, you have your supply chain sorted out, you have your backup supply chain sorted out. So, what we see from our clients are usually good materials, and it’s rare that we see failures because of the pool of companies that use us. I don’t know what the other labs are experiencing. My suspicion is they’re also passing a lot of material because they’re not great at plants and fungus, so they’re not catching what we’re catching.

But it’s usually dilute stuff. It’s things that have been either diluted with maltodextrin or perhaps, like I mentioned in that coffee example, extracted twice and sent back to the industry. And again, you can extract a botanical, sell that extract, you can extract it again, sell it to someone else, extract it again, and then you can sell that extracted material because those coffee grinds that I throw in my garden are still coffee, it’s still coffee beans. I can with the microscope, I can look at it and say, “This is coffee, coffee Arabica.” But with HPTLC I would say, “This is the most diluted cup of coffee I’ve ever seen.” And we would reject it.

Evelyne: Yeah, it’s very interesting, because even when we have rejected materials or I’ve seen other companies reject materials, it’s still in the supply chain and you see other companies use it, which is interesting to say the least. Since you mentioned that elderberry is one of the most adulterated. I’m curious, for the practitioners listening whose patients maybe are coming in and are taking random supplements, what are some of the other ingredients that you see are the most adulterated in our industry?

Elan: The ones that come to mind, elderberry obviously, because we would see cold and flu season and then weight loss season in our industry. Cold and flu season never left. After COVID it’s been cold and flu season for almost half a decade, and I think it’ll stick around for a while because people are very interested in helping their immune systems considering what has just happened and maybe what’s coming next. The other one is ashwagandha. We see a lot of failures in that arena. Early on we would see a lot of leaf materials showing up with roots. Again, genetics would say, “Genetics can’t differentiate plant part, so ashwagandha leaf, ashwagandha root, same genetics.” HPTLC very clearly differentiates that. So, people were adding leaf to root to bolster weight, trick the tests. Very easy to differentiate. And then nowadays, we occasionally see from some of the big ashwagandha brands, a mystery peak show up, we fail our materials, mystery peaks goes away. We never know what it is. They never talk about it. It’s kind of something happened in their processing.

We have what we call, Herbs To Watch. So, if you follow us on LinkedIn, every quarter we publish a list called Herbs To Watch and it’s basically our frequent failures. And most recently American Botanical Council who has a program, man, I’m going to butcher it. I’m not going to even bother, BAPP. Program to basically to urge the industry to do better and to, they like to say, “Burn it, don’t return it.” But they’ve started to share and popularize our Herbs To Watch list. I forget what’s on, but we usually get the top 20 failures. But I think the top two have been elderberry and ashwagandha.

And ashwagandha might fail also because if they say, “I want an M-teen percent with unalloyeds,” and we find slightly less, it would fail. Back to that cantaloupe. We all have our different parameters of what a good cantaloupe is and someone might not be so picky as I was last night with my cantaloupe analysis. But, yeah, with unalloyeds coming up short and so we’ll fail things as a result, but that’s based on the brand’s spec. You as a brand would set your spec what we want to see in this ingredient, so it meets our quality standards. If it’s you need 0.6 and I see 0.59, we’re going to fail it. So it doesn’t mean it’s poison if we fail it, it just means it’s not hitting the spec that you had requested.

Evelyne: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting too, with an example like ashwagandha, sometimes you want it standardized to one thing, like with unalloyeds, sometimes to the withanoids, which is something that we also have. So, there’s just so many different things that you can look at. And I think that as our industry continues to evolve, we’re looking at more of what those constituents are. It makes me think of the work of Alexander Panossian. He’s done a lot of research on adaptogens and looking at different constituents. He has some really interesting papers. When I did my master’s, I wrote my capstone paper on ashwagandha and rhodiola, and so I read a lot of his papers. Super, super interesting. I want to get close to wrapping up. What do you see as some of the trends in our industry that continue to grow?

Elan: Yeah, so my little corner of this industry, I see a trend of noticing. I think overall, globally, what we experienced through the pandemic is people are, there was scary and we trusted and then we realized, “Well, actually, it’s not that we should have not trusted it, we should have asked more questions.” And so I saw something written on that, noticing is up globally. People are just paying more attention to labels and things. And so this industry to me is really supported by a lot of really intelligent people who are trying to impact their health in a natural way as well as embracing new technology and Western medicine. But, to me, they’re noticing, they’re looking at labels more, they’re reading labels more, they’re really demanding more of a natural, organic, sustainable, fair trade, all those things. But I think they’re also wondering about the quality, because I mentioned earlier in this podcast that there’s this narrative that we’re untested, unregulated, unsafe.

And so they’re reaching for evidence that that’s not the case. And that, to me, comes from a good communication plan about quality from the brands, which I believe will be, like I said, we can brag about sustainability and regenerative agriculture and all these things that are really important, packaging and sustainable materials, but the quality of our products is really what’s most important. And so it’s like a value proposition that we still have yet to exploit. We exploited all the do-good stuff and the master formulations and really embracing new adaptogens. They’ve been around for thousands of years, we just gave it a name and it’s popular again. Mushrooms, the shroom boom. They’ve been around for thousands of years. We’ve done a better job of marketing it most recently. The next thing that needs to happen, I think, is going to happen, is the next level of sharing in this industry, is the quality behind the industry because it’s the only thing missing from our value propositions to the consumers.

Evelyne: Yeah, very interesting. Thank you for sharing. We have some questions that I like to ask every guest on our podcast. What are your top three favorite supplements that you take?

Elan: Top three, I always profess that probiotics are the first. When someone asks me, “What should I take?” or what do I take, I think probiotics are absolutely critical. To me, it doesn’t matter how good you eat or how bad you eat if your machine is not cooking the food correctly, like your oven doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter if you’re taking good supplements or good quality ingredients in your food or not, it’s just going to go out. And so if you, probiotics are really critically important, especially with… My suspicion is there’s a lot of drugs, and not like street drugs, like pharmaceutical drugs in our bodies these days as we sort out this strange world and those do have a number on our normal gut flora from here all the way down to the bottom. And so I think probiotics are absolutely critical.

The next one, for me, are omegas or fish oils. Primarily just because my shoulders hurt when I don’t take them. I get clickety-clacks and it hurts to do this, and I know, and I’m not making a claim here, but I know that they do have impact on joint health, brain health or eye health, all those really critical things. And then the third one, this is a battle because I think multiple vitamins are really important. You don’t get all those nutrients from eating healthy. You get great nutrients being healthy, but these are dietary supplements. These are supplementing a good diet. And so I think the multiples are next in line. Right behind that would be the functional mushrooms. And I’m trying to, my eyes have gotten a little bit worse over the years, so now I’m taking an eye health product and soon I’ll be doing a skin one or something like that. But the top three are really probiotics and omega supplement and then the multiple vitamins.

Evelyne: Love that. Well, for skin, we just released Designs for Beauty. So, we’ve been recording some podcasts on skin health recently.

Elan: Oh, good.

Evelyne: What are your top health practices? You’re obviously very busy, CEO, we’ve got a family, you’re doing a lot of things outside of work. How do you stay healthy?

Elan: I am an early bird and a late night owl, so I do both. Don’t ask me about my sleep. It’s the last thing I need to fix. I don’t have any other issues other than that. Well, maybe I have issues, but things that I can get better at is sleep. But I’m absolutely in love with my infrared sauna. We bought one about three years ago. My wife and I sold our house in LA County and moved to Orange County and with a little bit of cash, we said, “Let’s get one of these things.” And it’s just magical.

I go in about every other day, I cook at like 150 degrees for 30 minutes to an hour. I’ll lose a pound of sweat. My watch will measure, the heart rate goes up to 130, 140s, I’ll burn several hundred calories. And whether it’s just the sort of induced adversity that you then survive, you feel top of the world or the fact that you’ve just sweated it all out. And you don’t smell afterwards, everything comes out and you just feel like you took a shower. I absolutely love it. In fact, when my kids get the sniffles of a nine and a almost seven-year-old, we’ll put them in there and we’ll bake them at 135 for 15 minutes and their little sniffles go away because they basically will induce a fever that is designed for health. See what I did there? To basically kill any bugs.

Evelyne: The way you just said that, “We bake them.”

Elan: So yeah, sauna is my favorite thing that I’ve been doing. And then most recently, as I mentioned earlier, I just, six months ago I started Jujitsu.

Evelyne: That’s amazing.

Elan: I’m 45, and that’s a little late age to get into a combat sport, but I’m absolutely loving the consensual brutality of this sport and the fact that there’s a… Before that, I was at this gym and it was doing all sorts of cool devices and equipment, but there was an end. It was like, “How much more can I leg press before my back or legs hurt?” And then I basically suffer from injuries and go backwards. Jujitsu for me is, or for anyone, could be a lifelong journey. It’s years and years and years before you can get to the highest level, which actually never is the highest level, because the highest level goes forever. And absolutely in love with that sport. It’s a chess match with your body and people are trying to murder you almost. So again, back to adversity, I sauna and then I do Jujitsu and there’s nothing an email can hurt me with at this point.

Evelyne: I love that perspective. That’s great.

Elan: Yeah, so those are my two. And then taking supplements, I subscribe to this industry. I take the industry supplements. I take what I test, I test what I take, and I’ve got an insider view on all that.

Evelyne: Very cool. And last question for you, what is something that you’ve changed your mind about through all your years in this industry?

Elan: For me, I think what comes up to mind is how I experienced the last few years through the pandemic as an example of a global health crisis. And I make up a story that the consumers want to know more about what’s in products. I make up a story that they want to understand things. I’ve never been a fan of the trust-the-science, I’ve always been a challenge-the-science kind of a guy. And I think that extends to the consumers now. They are noticing more. They’re reading labels. They’re more concerned about everything from packaging to the quality of the ingredients. And so, it was very confusing and scary a few years back and we were all frantically making very quick decisions about our health. Now that things have softened up, I think we learned that lesson and we’re still on guard, whether it’s present now or coming next.

And so, to me, what I’ve learned personally is that we need to be more transparent about how good we are in this industry. And labs like Alkemist Labs give their clients an opportunity to share the quality at the consumer level or even internally, just to have the full method disclosure is really critical for just our clients and their brands to feel comfortable about those test results. So it’s really about, to me, that the consumers and the industry are expecting more data than they were just five years ago and it’s our job to give that to them in a safe and effective story. For sure.

Evelyne: Yeah. Elan, this was so informative. Thank you so much. I learned a lot from you. So, thank you for being here today.

Elan: My pleasure. Thank you much for the opportunity.

Evelyne: Thank you for tuning into Conversations for Health. Check out the show notes for any resources we share today, and please share this podcast with your colleagues, follow, rate or leave a review wherever you listen and thank you for designing a well world with us.

Voiceover This is Conversations for Health with Evelyne Lambrecht, dedicated to engaging discussions with industry experts exploring evidence-based, cutting-edge research and practical tips.