This post series on botanical ingredient adulteration is inspired by the excellent work coming out of the Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP) by the American Botanical Council (ABC), continuing today with:
🏔️ 🌿 Maca(Lepidium meyenii): a high-Andean food plant and adaptogen ingredient, whose rapid rise in demand and sharp price swings have made it vulnerable to economically motivated adulteration.
Maca has a long history of use in the central Andes as a nutrient‑dense food and tonic, with the dried hypocotyl traditionally boiled and consumed as a staple.
Much of the current supplement market is supplied as powders and extracts (often standardized to macamides, macaenes, or related markers), which creates added incentive to dilute authentic root material with cheaper fillers, misrepresent extract as root powder, or manipulate marker levels.
For companies, confirming identity is not optional; it’s a legal and ethical duty under cGMPs to verify that each incoming botanical is the right species, the right plant part, and meets agreed quality specs. Brands and manufacturers should be leaning on resources like the BAPP adulteration bulletins and implementing fit-for-purpose analytical methods, rather than relying on nonspecific tests that can miss plant-part adulteration.
Adulteration, in the regulatory sense, means a product is unsafe or of inferior quality because it fails to meet legal standards for purity, strength, or composition (including contamination).
What is highlighted in these posts are economic adulteration: intentional substitution, dilution, or undeclared additions that misrepresent a botanical’s true identity or quality compared to what the label and consumer would reasonably expect.
For more detailed information on adulterants in botanicals, see the BAPP publications, which are freely available on their website.
To view the downloadable PDF post, go to LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kerry-hughes-941353_maca-adulterants-ugcPost-7458385864658882561-gCBB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAANEoEBzLdbgS9fjLoyZvrkZbXD8Nj5SFM