The latest blog post from Frank Azar:
Early last week, GNC, Target, Walmart, and Walgreens each received letters, from Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s office “regarding the alleged selling of store brand herbal supplement products in New York that either could not be verified to contain the labeled substance, or were found to contain ingredients not listed on the labels”.
According to LawyersAndSettlements.com, The Attorney General’s office is calling for retailers to stop selling an array of well-known and popular products immediately, such as Echinacea, Ginseng, St. John’s Wort, and others. According to the letters, only 21% of the tested store brand herbal supplements in fact showed DNA from the listed plans on the products’ labels, “with 79% coming up empty for DNA related to the labeled content or verifying contamination with other plant material”. Walmart had the poorest rating of the four retailers, with only 4% of the tested products showing DNA from the plants listed on the products’ labels.
As of right now, the investigation has uncovered what seems to be a “practice of substituting contaminants and fillers in the place of authentic product”. Additionally, testing revealed that the retailers were all selling a major percentage of supplements for which modern DNA barcoding technology could not detect the botanical substance that was actually labeled.
21% of the product tests have confirmed DNA barcodes from the plant species listed on the labels; however, 35% of the tests identified DNA barcodes from plant species not listed on their respective labels, thus making it a case of consumer fraud. In fact, many of the tests didn’t reveal DNA from any type of botanical substance at all. “Some of the contaminants identified include rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant, wild carrot, and others”.
The retailers involved in this investigation have been asked to provide very detailed information relating to the “production, processing and testing of herbal supplements sold at their stores”.
To read the entire article, published on Lawyersandsettlements.com, click here.
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