’Discussions with manufacturers often get nowhere’

Food supplements made from blueberries were attested by the Münster team as having 'catastrophic quality deficiencies'. © pixabay Food supplements are available in a lot of places - in drugstores, health food shops, pharmacies and on the Internet - and the market is booming. Many of these products contain plant extracts whose ingredients are supposed to have healthy benefits - provided they do actually contain what they claim. Because nowhere near all of these so-called botanicals deliver what they promise. "Over the past few years there have been increasing indications that some of these botanicals have huge quality deficiencies," reports Prof. Andreas Hensel from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology and Phytochemistry (IPBP) at the University of Münster. For example, there may be reduced content levels, or sometimes products are found which have no active ingredients, or they contain questionable, undeclared ingredients. The IPBP is carrying out its own scientific studies as part of a long-term project on assessing the quality of food supplements.