Steven Dentali, PhD, is chief science officer at the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) where his duties include helping to set quality standards for the botanical products industry and providing guidance and advice to AHPA member companies, related organizations, government agencies, scientific publications and the popular press. He is a U.S. Pharmacopoeia Convention delegate and a member of the USP Standards Expert Committee: Nomenclature, Safety, and Labeling. He is also editorial board chair of AOAC and secretary of the AOAC Presidential Task Force on Dietary Supplements. An advisory board member of the American Botanical Council and the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, he also chaired the Product Quality Working Group of the National Advisory Council for the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the NIH from 2005 to 2007. Dr. Dentali has 20 post graduate years of experience in the U.S. herbal and dietary supplement industry having worked with small craftsmanship botanical houses, large and small agricultural efforts, and as senior director of botanical sciences for a large corporate supplement company. He was trained as an herbalist prior to earning his doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences with a specialization in natural products chemistry from the University of Arizona, Tucson. An American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education fellow, Dr. Dentali’s understanding of traditional uses of therapeutic herbs gives him a unique perspective on the emerging scientific data on medicinal botanicals. Recognized as a foremost expert in the natural products industry and a frequent lecturer, he is considered an authority on botanical product quality issues and is known to be an active participant in discussions with organizations and institutions that have an interest in herbal and other natural health products.
 
Health E-Insights: What do you feel is the future of dietary supplements?
 
Dr. Dentali: The future of dietary supplements includes the recognition of herbal products as viable healthcare options. Mainstream and most professions abandoned plant-based medicines two to three generations ago in favor of potent single actives and later, synthetic compounds designed for specific pharmacological activities. As we better understand systems-biology, we are in a better position to understand the subtle and profound effects such as those caused by ingesting botanical extracts. Recognition of certain mushroom extracts for supporting the immune system during cancer chemotherapy could signal a sea change in the medical community’s view of dietary supplements, for example.  
 
Health E-Insights: How has supplement-relevant science changed in the past few years?
 
Dr. Dentali: The biggest technological change in analytical product-quality assessment has been the application of software programs that can make sense of complex sets of data. The use of software that can measure chemical differences by careful selection and manipulation of data, so called chemometric analysis, is a very powerful tool that when properly employed can significantly aid ingredient identification and product-quality determinations. Fortunately, the major analytical equipment manufacturers are becoming more involved in the industry. Their expertise will offer considerable potential for solving problems once they figure out what those problems are.
 
Health E-Insights: What are the industry’s current biggest challenges from a technical point of view?
 
Dr. Dentali: In some ways industry is just getting up to speed to where it should have been if we hadn’t originally lost sight of the value of natural medicines. I believe there continues to be a need for appropriate scientific expertise applied in manufacturing situations and that product-quality determinations and purchasing decisions must always go far beyond a name, marker compound, and price point. A significant practical challenge is also presented by analytical technologies to teach the instruments what authentic material actually is, and is not, in order to allow differentiation of quality from substandard materials without fail. To do that, sufficient numbers of samples that represent both an appropriate range of authentic materials and similar materials that should be rejected must be acquired, analyzed, and the results evaluated. Finding validated biomarkers for what supplements do in order to better design and inform clinical trials is also a challenge, but that applies to all of current health research.
 
Health E-Insights: Is there a golden rule by which you live?
 
Dr. Dentali: The one I learned in Cub Scouts. Leave a campsite in a better condition than you found it. It works better than the leave no trace concept now being taught by the Boy Scouts.
 
Health E-Insights: What one thing do you want to accomplish by the end of 2011?
 
Dr. Dentali: Go on another reef dive, prune the fruit trees and buy new high-performance tires for the car.
 
Health E-Insights: If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you and why?
 
Dr. Dentali: James Woods, because he’s brilliant, original and persistent. Steve Buscemi, or Giovanni Ribisi as a younger me would also be considered for their quirkiness and the ‘i’ at the end of their last names.
 
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