Bilberry Market 'Rife' with Adulteration

AUSTIN, TexasSome dietary supplements labeled as containing Bilberry Extract" are adulterated with lower-cost, non-bilberry ingredients that are not stated on the products labels, according to a new report published in HerbalGram (2012;96:64-73).

Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) fruit and its products can be found in health products, foods, and cosmetics; its active ingredients are known as anthocyanosides or anthocyanins. In 2011, bilberry dietary supplements were the 15th best selling single-herb supplement in the mainstream market in the United States, which includes grocery stores, drug stores and mass-market retail stores. Reported health benefits of bilberry are primarily in the vascular domain and include treatment of vascular insufficiency, capillary fragility and retinopathy.

Given global demand for this relatively high-cost, wild-harvested berry, bilberry supplies are reportedly rife with economic adulteration," wrote HerbalGram article co-authors Steven Foster, an author and widely published botanical photographer, and Mark Blumenthal, ABCs founder and executive director, and editor of HerbalGram.

According to the article, the worlds entire supply of commercial bilberry is wild-harvested, primarily in Scandinavian countries and in Eastern Europe. [T]he relatively small region of growth for bilberries suggests that there is not much elasticity in the price of raw material," the authors wrote. One industry expert quoted in the article explains that it takes 100 kg of hand-picked bilberry fruit to make 1 kg of extract, which can cost anywhere from $325 to $600 for the bilberry raw material alone, depending on seasonal supply and other factors. Therefore, considering other costs (e.g., refrigerated storage and transportation, extraction, etc.) the economics strongly suggest some of the lower-cost bilberry extracts currently available in the global supply market are adulterated with other, cheaper, ingredients. Among the adulterants cited in the article were amaranth dye, charcoal, black soybean hull and other lower-cost fruits containing anthocyanin pigments.

Industry awareness of bilberry adulteration has led to the development of advanced chemical analysesincluding versions of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and other appropriate analytical methodsthat can determine the precise contents of bilberry products. According to the authors, the mixture in bilberry produces a unique pattern set that distinguishes bilberry from all other anthocyanoside sources."