Research, education, quality, transparency…these are essential to the healthy growth of the natural products industry, and we owe our thanks to the pioneers who have had the vision, passion, and integrity to demand that we always strive for excellence in service of the consumer. Chief among those leaders: Mark Blumenthal, the man behind HerbalGram, the American Botanical Council (ABC), and the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP). For the significant impact he has had on the industry, Blumenthal, ABC Founder & Executive Director, Editor-in-Chief, HerbalGram & HerbClip, and Director of BAPP, is being recognized as WholeFoods Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year.
Finding His Way
Today, Blumenthal is regarded as a premier expert in botanicals. As a young college undergrad, though, this field wasn’t on his radar. “In the spring of 1968, when I was about to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, the U.S. was engaged in a major build-up of troops during the Vietnam War,” Blumenthal shares. “As part of this buildup, the U.S. government terminated the graduate school deferment from the draft (compulsory conscription into the U.S. Army), which had been engaged as a source of manpower in the Army. (Students who were studying pre-med or pre-dental received automatic deferments, but were then required to serve in the military upon graduation from medical or dental school.) At that time, U.S. grad schools were overflowing with middle-class male students who were using grad school as a means to avoid the draft, regardless of the area of study: history, sociology, political science (my major), anthropology, philosophy, literature, art, engineering…whatever. As part of this process, I examined my core values, and confirmed that I was a pacifist. Accordingly, I became a vegetarian. I won’t kill a person, or an animal, and I won’t pay someone to kill an animal for me.”
Blumenthal was just shy of 22 at the time, and he explored his limited options of health food stores in Austin as he transitioned to a vegetarian diet. “These were primarily pill shops with a few foods for people on special diets,” he recalls. “The advent of the natural foods stores of the early 1970s had not yet emerged.”
Still, what the health food stores of the 1960s did have caught his interest: varieties of herbal teas beyond the recognizable mint and chamomile, and books that dealt with wild edible plants and medicinal herbs. He picked up The Herbalist by Joseph Meyer, Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, and The Herb Book by John Lust…and a spark that has helped transform the herbal industry was lit.
“These books were all based on folklore, not science,” Blumenthal says. “There was little scientific research on herbs back then, and what there was—mainly in Europe—was not being reported in the United States. I was fascinated, and studying herbs became a hobby for me.”
Blumenthal, with his growing interest in botanicals and a vegetarian lifestyle, spent the next two years on a commune that had recently been formed near Taos, NM. He was off the grid, living with no running water and no electricity in a small one-room house that he built out of scrap wood, and later expanded to two rooms. He took his cues from the Whole Earth Catalog, an American counterculture magazine with an editorial focus on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, a “do it yourself” lifestyle, and holism.
In 1972, Blumenthal made his way back to Austin, and soon started a new venture, launching the wholesale herb company Sweethardt Herbs along with a friend in 1974. An article published in HerbalGram detailed that endeavor: “Mark spent many days and many more miles traveling in his van to visit health food store owners with his products. Even at this early date, he was establishing himself as an authority known as ‘the root doctor’ by a DJ on a local talk-radio show on which he was a weekly guest, and the ‘stand-up botanist.’ But probably most important, Mark was serving as a link in the relatively new world of health foods, herbal products, and alternative health issues in this country. Realizing a need to close the gap between reality and poor information, and to educate the public to medicinal choices that had existed for many years in other countries, Blumenthal began taking the subject of herbs much more seriously.”
Elevating Education
Focusing on the need for education, Blumenthal and Rob McCaleb (then the research director at Celestial Seasonings herbal tea company) started “Herbalgram” as a newsletter in 1983. In those early days, the publication was a newsletter for the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA, formed in 1982 with Blumenthal and McCaleb as founding board members) and the nonprofit Herb Research Foundation (HRF, for which Blumenthal and McCaleb were co-founders).
In 1988, Blumenthal went on to establish ABC along with renowned ethnobotanist James A. Duke, Ph.D. (1929–2017), and acclaimed pharmacognosist Norman R. Farnsworth, Ph.D. (1930–2011). Blumenthal explains that ABC was initially created as a nonprofit platform to transform “Herbalgram” the newsletter into HerbalGram, the peer-reviewed magazine/journal that is now marking 40 years in circulation. Only a few scientific journals on medicinal plants existed at that time, and there was not much reliable information available on herbs, medicinal plants, and their products in the market. ABC stepped in to fill the void.
That was the start of something much bigger. “ABC evolved into a dynamic, science-based, independent, nonprofit research and education organization, the many projects and programs of which are almost all based on articles we’ve published in HerbalGram over the past 40 years. These include issues related to conservation of medicinal plants, rational regulation of herbal supplements, clinical research, quality control and authenticity, and more,” Blumenthal shares.
The reach continued to expand as more industry thought leaders saw the benefits of ABC’s initiatives. One example: “I was invited to a small meeting of some herb industry leaders at the SupplySide West conference and trade show in Las Vegas in October 2010,” Blumenthal tells WholeFoods. “The meeting was specifically designed to request that ABC initiate an herb product testing program that would demonstrate to the public which brands of herbal products are authentic and which ones are adulterated with fraudulent ingredients.” Loren Israelsen of the United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA), Greg Ris of Indena, Indena salesman Chris Tower (now Manager of Euromed North America), Cal Bewicke of Ethical Naturals, and Frank Jaksch, Founder and CEO of Chromadex, were among those looking to level up quality, trust, and transparency with ABC’s help.
“The reason for their having asked ABC to take on such a testing program is due to ABC’s Ginseng Evaluation Program (GEP) in the 1990s, in which ABC established a program that analyzed literally 500 commercial products labeled to contain ‘ginseng’ which were sold in North America—the largest program of this type that has ever occurred, before or since.” Bottom line, Blumenthal reports: About 25% of the “ginseng” products were deemed either adulterated or at least somehow mislabeled.
Blumenthal left SupplySide and took the group’s suggested proposal to the ABC Board of Trustees, which had concerns. “The Board decided publishing laboratory results of products that passed or failed various laboratory tests might result in ABC’s being involved in protracted litigation with one or more of the companies whose product(s) had failed, and the ABC Board wanted to steer clear of this potentially huge expense and diversion of ABC’s time and focus,” Blumenthal shares.
Knowing there was a need for some kind of action, Blumenthal devised an alternative. “Since testing products was out of the question, I suggested Plan B: How about if we simply researched the types of adulteration and fraud that was occurring in the global market and reported this via a peer-reviewed process? In this way, responsible parties in the herb and dietary supplement industry could utilize our credible, peer-reviewed information to help protect themselves against the unscrupulous sellers of adulterated and fraudulent ingredients. The ABC Board approved this idea, and in late 2010/early 2011 BAPP was born. So, in a very real sense, these people—those folks at the SSW meeting in 2010—share in the founding of BAPP.”
There are more examples of ABC’s leadership and positive impact, of course. Over the past 35 years since its founding in 1988, ABC has grown into an internationally respected organization reaching members in more than 80 countries, with numerous publications and programs. As Blumenthal recently shared on ABC’s website: “ABC’s publications and programs have grown to include resources that can help virtually everyone in the herbal community.” In addition to HerbalGram and 83 freely accessible peer-reviewed documents from BAPP, ABC offers HerbClip (with over 9,000 summaries of scientific studies), the robust HerbMedPro database, HerbalEGram, Herbal News & Events, the Sustainable Herbs Program website, newsletter and blog, and the Botanical Adulterants Monitor newsletter. “Many of these are freely available to tens of thousands of people,” Blumenthal says. “Others are for ABC Members only, to help fund our essential nonprofit work to promote, world-wide, the responsible use of herbal medicine for healthcare and selfcare.”
Advocating for consumers
Blumenthal’s official bio outlines his many (many!) accomplishments. Among them:
- former advisor to the Center for Alternative Medicine at the UT School of Public Health;
- member of the Board of Advisors for the Center for Integrative Therapies in Pharmaceutical Care for the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Programs at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston);
- consultant on final draft of the World Health Organization’s “Guidelines for the Assessment of Herbal Medicines” (1991);
- reviewer of research grant proposals made to the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institute of Health (now the Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at NIH);
- testified before the Presidential Commission on Dietary Supplement Labels, presenting an overview of the Regulation of Botanicals and Phytomedicines in Europe, to assist the Commission in its goal of providing truthful and accurate information to consumers making informed healthcare choices;
- testified twice before the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy on issues of developing incentives to stimulate botanical medicine research and programs and herbal medicine for continuing education;
- testified before the House Subcommittee on Government Reform in the U.S. Congress, speaking on international regulation of herbal medicines;
- Served as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas-Austin for six years.
These efforts have had a positive impact on the natural products industry, but that is not Blumenthal’s primary focus. “While it may appear that I have advocated on behalf of industry over the past 35 years of my leadership at ABC, the real truth of the matter is that I am really advocating on behalf of the herb consumer,” he explains. “To me it’s all about the person who is putting that herb product in their mouths (teas, capsules, tablets, extracts) or on their skin (salves, creams, lotions, cosmetics, et al.). Of course, if you’re going to be looking out for the benefits of the consumer, you have to look at the industry, since that’s where the ingredients are produced and the consumer products are made and marketed. So, in this quest, ABC has frequently engaged in matters and issues that are industry-centric—for example, ABC’s vitally needed and pioneering work in helping to support and protect the responsible elements in the herb industry from being defrauded by unscrupulous sellers of adulterated and fraudulent materials and products via the now 13-year efforts of the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP), the world’s largest nonprofit research and educational program on this subject. And, to date (November 2023) BAPP has published 83 peer-reviewed documents that are freely available on the BAPP homepage on the ABC website so that anyone at any company, laboratory, research center, and/or government agency anywhere in the world can access our authoritative findings and guidance documents.”
Driving the point home, he says, “At the end of the day, this is about the consumer; we are helping responsible people in the global medicinal plant industry ensure that the ingredients they purchase and use in their products are properly identified and authentic. This helps consumers have more benefits from herbs and other natural plant-based and fungal-based ingredients.”
Mindsets, Milestones, and Memories
Blumenthal attributes ABC’s success to his team. Asked about the mindset that has helped fuel his mission, he shares, “I am reminded of the dictum to always hire people that are smarter than you. My corollary to that is to hire people who not only are very intelligent, but who are also highly motivated and do not need much supervision. I tend to place a considerable degree of trust in others, and I want to trust that they will want to do the best they can, working for the unique nonprofit research and educational mission of ABC in whatever way(s) they can.”
When asked about favorite memories, Blumenthal points to his team. Setting the scene, he shares that ABC’s offices are located in a house that was built in the 1860s, located on a historic 2.5-acre property in East Austin, Texas. “It was on November 1, 2018 that one of ABC’s employees called me and asked that I come down to the kitchen. All the ABC employees—except for a few who work out of town; there are more doing this now, post-pandemic—were assembled there and they announced a surprise Happy Birthday ABC Party. It was our 30th Anniversary. As part of this celebration, they presented me with a gift. I opened it to find a bolt of cloth—a very special cloth! It was a royal blue (one of my favorite colors!) with images of ABC’s echinacea logo and covers of ABC’s flagship publication, HerbalGram. ABC’s Art Director Matt Magruder had created the design and a member of the ABC staff had located an Italian company that produced custom cloth designs made from rayon produced from sustainable bamboo. I was ecstatic! There was nothing like this cloth—anywhere! I took the cloth to a tailor shop along with one of my Hawaiian shirts to be used as a template, and lo! There was enough cloth to make two shirts!”
Industry members who know Blumenthal know this shirt well. It has become his signature, and to this day, five years later, he still wears that custom ABC shirt to trade shows and special occasions. “There are no two shirts like mine anywhere in the world,” Blumenthal says. “But that’s not the main takeaway for me. To me, the fact that ABC’s employees cared enough about the organization’s 30th anniversary, and me, to go to the time and expense to create the special piece of cloth—to me this is one of the greatest honors I have ever received, from anyone. I am still profoundly grateful to the ABC staff for having conceived of the idea, and followed through with it.”
The shirt has become a bit famous in fact, in part due to how snazzy it is, but surely also in part because Blumenthal wears it with such joy. “Many friends and colleagues at trade shows and conferences ask me if they can buy a shirt like mine,” he says. “We’ve contemplated going into the ABC logo and HerbalGram cover shirt business—possibly a great way to promote ABC’s unique nonprofit educational mission!”
Takeaways for the Industry
The industry has made significant progress since the early days, when natural products stores didn’t have many food options, and books on medicinal herbs didn’t have much science support. There’s a lot we are collectively doing right these days. Blumenthal’s quick list: Focus on natural ingredients, organic, regenerative agriculture, sustainability, climate crisis, B-Corp Certification, inclusion and equity, et al.
That said, there is always room for progress. What can we do better to achieve our goals of enhancing wellness for all? “Responsible members of the herb, dietary supplement, and natural products industry can and should focus more awareness of the extent of adulteration and fraud in the global marketplace for botanical ingredients,” Blumenthal advises. “As we have been doing now for 13 years via the ABC-founded and managed ABC-AHP (American Herbal Pharmacopoeia)-NCNPR (National Center for Natural Products Research at Ole Miss) Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP), we have extensively researched and documented over 27 popular herbs and essential oils that the scientific literature demonstrates are subject to adulteration, with more publications on more herbs underway. To date (November 2023) BAPP has published 83 peer-reviewed documents that document the fraud but that also provide authoritative information and guidance to responsible members of the industry as to how they can protect themselves from purchasing adulterated/fraudulent ingredients from unscrupulous sellers who either know that they are selling adulterated ingredients, or who don’t care to adequately confirm their proper identity via appropriate analytical testing—as required by law in most instances.”
Consumers purchase supplements and other natural products for one basic reason, Blumenthal stresses: “for their demonstrated and/or presumed health benefits. If the ingredients in these products are not authentic—i.e., if they are substituted and/or diluted with undisclosed ingredients of lesser value, and, in most cases, lesser biological activity—then consumers will not receive the health benefits which they are expecting. This is a problem for the consumer(s), and, eventually, a problem for the natural products industry. And, it’s not just about the suppliers and/or the manufacturers; the natural products retailer has a role to play in this process. They are the ‘Guardians at the Gate,’ as my colleague Michael Levin likes to say.”
Gratitude Above All Else
Throughout all his accomplishments, and the positive ripple effect that has stemmed from that 21-year-old pacifist picking up a book on medicinal herbs, Blumenthal’s resilient and humble nature shines. “I’ve always been somewhat of a self-starter and relatively industrious,” he shares. “In high school I had two paper routes every morning, before breakfast and school…In college, I helped a friend start a company that sold Popsicles® and other junk food novelties from a fleet of small vehicles, and over my career I’ve started (or co-started) eight for-profit businesses and helped found four non-profits. So, I’m a very optimistic fellow. Pessimists obviously don’t make successful entrepreneurs. And yet, there have been some times when things weren’t always successful and going my way. During those days, I learned that there was something more important than seeing the glass as being half-full: I was simply grateful to have the glass!”
Asked to share what he is most proud of in his career, he redirects the question: “I do not have pride in my work or the results of it. I was raised by parents who taught my brother and me to serve others. It’s not about pride; it’s about gratitude. Gratitude for being healthy. Gratitude to have family and friends, and meaningful work, and gratitude to be in a position to serve others, create benefits for others, and to help make a better world, one day, and one plant, at a time.” WF
HerbalGram Turns 40!
To mark the milestone, ABC is instituting a year-long project to enhance its unique, international, nonprofit research and educational mission, publications, and programs: the HerbalGram 40 Project and Fund. As part of the project, ABC supporters can submit comments and insights to help celebrate the 40-year milestone, as well as to identify enhancements to existing ABC programs and suggest possible new programs and projects relevant to the herbal community. The comments showcase the education and inspiration HerbalGram has offered over the years. Take this message from Jim Emme, CEO of NOW Foods, for example: “HerbalGram has had quite an impact on my life and career. Many years ago, my sister, [who] was a Master Gardener ... subscribed to HerbalGram. She gave me a ‘bootleg’ copy and, even though I was a food chemist at the time, it introduced me to the world and science of botanicals. And now here I am, decades later, the CEO of NOW, a dietary supplement company, interested and involved in all aspects of the botanical industry and still relying on HerbalGram to provide inspiration, trusted information, and resources.”
In addition to adding comments, supporters can submit donations to fund the continued growth of ABC and HerbalGram on the webpage. The donations help the nonprofit meet the growing demand for responsible, reliable, science-based herb and medicinal plant information. Visit ABC’s website to learn how to join ABC and receive HerbalGram.
And of course, there is a learning opportunity. In the summer 2023 issue of HerbalGram (#138), Blumenthal shares a seven-page history of the publication in his “Dear Reader” column, which is usually one page. Blumenthal documents the evolution of both HerbalGram and ABC, providing examples of key ABC projects whose genesis are based on seminal HerbalGram articles. Readers can learn about ABC’s translation and publication of The Complete German Commission E Monographs—Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines in 1998, ABC’s 9,000+ two- to three-page HerbClip summaries of clinical and other scientific research papers, the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP), and more!
