Healthy INSIDER Podcast

ToddCast Vol. XVIII: You say you want a revolution? Hemp is the answer—that’s right, it can pave the way to better alternatives than many of the problems staring us in the face as industrial, civilized humans – the plastic problem, the climate crisis, the pollution of our waterways, the unsustainable way we have organized our societies. Natural Products Insider senior editor Todd Runestad catches up the hemp majordomo promoter Morris Beegle, co-founder and president of WAFBA—short for We Are For Better Alternatives. Listen in as they dig into:

How it’s time for people engaged in the hemp CBD business to go pro—or go home and stop gumming up the architecture of this fledgling industry.

The key to the realm of hemp dominance is when “whole plant utilization” comes to fruition—using not just the flower for CBD but the stems, stalks and seeds for biomaterials, biofuels, bioplastics, animal feed and healthy human nutrition.

The one entity that can save us from being “f@(#*d” by climate change and lead the way (with hemp, of course) on a more sustainable course

Too much hemp in the fields and barns, too many brands, too little regulatory certainty (and misguided when it does get released). Buckle up!

Josh Hendrix has been around the hemp farms, the hemp businesses, the hemp boards. He’s sharp, smart and informed—and reasonably hip, at least by Kentucky standards. Natural Products Insider senior editor Todd Runestad sat down with Josh to assess the damage from smoking embers of the hemp CBD business in mid-2020. Yes, there was massive overproduction in 2019. Yes, there is regulatory intransigence. Yes, there was 4,000 hemp CBD brands at last count. But you know what you don’t know?

- How the leading CBD brand is positioning itself as something bigger than just a hemp CBD brand.

- The big mistake most of those CBD brands make that will be a big contributor to their ultimate demise.

- “If you and I get on the phone in 10 years and hemp fiber is not a huge part of the materials world, I’ll be shocked.”

Tennessee’s Frederick Cawthon is emblematic of a 2020 hemp farmer—in 2019 his team grew 85 acres, and then thanks to the oversupply and consequent market saturation and price collapse, in 2020 he grew 15 acres. Hear Cawthon’s founding story of how he got into the hemp business, how he assembled a crack growing team, marshaled investors, even cajoled the local college president to open dormant dorms to farm workers during the summer grow season. But more than that, hear Cawthon speak about hemp’s potential to revitalize rural regions, and how CBD has the potential to be the next great ingredient that can be infused in a range of products by the world’s biggest CPG companies. Listen to this fascinating Toddcast with Natural Products Insider’s senior editor Todd Runestad, as they discuss:

- How his mother, the Lord, the universe and CNN fit into the spark of an idea to change his life and become a hemp farmer.

- How hemp can be a zero-carbon detox agent to clean up farms, communities and ecosystems.

- How all that hemp oversupply could be gone from barns across the nation if only two organizations would try just a little bit harder.

Hemp acreage has gone from 7,000 acres in 2015 to 27,000 to 78,000 in 2017 to an eye-popping half a million acres after the 2018 farm bill was passed. The ensuing gut has scaled back many farmers’ plans even while more farmers chase the gold ring—but the bigger problem remains intransigence by the FDA and USDA, which seem to be doing their drug warrior best to keep the hemp market from reaching full potential. Natural Products Insider senior editor Todd Runestad sat down with Rick Trojan, president of the Hemp Industries Association, to talk about a wide-ranging number of hempy topics, including:

- Are we in Bustville? Too much USDA opposition making farmers felons, too much FDA creating fear around CBD, too many farmers getting in too fast and driving down the price?

- How institutional racism figures into the history of hemp (it’s not a pretty sight, and it will open your eyes). #BLM

- Is the main challenge to hemp how potentially disruptive it is to various pre-existing industries? Are you up for the legislative and cultural fight to put more money in the pockets of farmers and rural communities rather than large corporations?

Despite the impact on business and industry posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, dietary supplement companies are still obligated to meet regulatory requirements including supplier qualification, ingredient testing, aspects of GMP compliance and more; every person involved in compliance must understand their responsibilities. To support the gap around in-person education and training, NSF International has developed Quality & Regulatory Digital Week, taking place August 3 to 7, 2020. Designed with the global nutraceutical industry in mind, various courses delve into particular aspects of regulatory compliance. The two-part Botanical Identification and Testing Course, set for August 6 and 7, addresses a range of issues unique to the herbal industry. In this Healthy Insider podcast, John Travis, senior research scientist at NSF, offers thoughts around the importance of botanical identification and testing methodologies.

In this podcast, Travis and Informa’s Heather Granato discuss:

• Why botanical identification continues to be of critical interest across the global supplement space, particularly as it relates to vendor qualification.

• Concerns around the issue of supply chain scarcity and potential adulteration, and how that could impact testing processes and methods.

• Key steps that manufacturers can take to ensure their botanical materials meet quality specs.

Adulteration of botanicals has been going a fact of human commerce since time immemorial. Only very recently has the game taken a turn for the technical as criminals and unsuspecting buyers use ever-more sophisticated tools—and schemes—to stay ahead of each other. In response, the American Botanical Council has co-created a Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program, a free series of bulletins to help buyers, brands and contract manufacturers learn which ingredients are being targeted, and the means why which adulterers are using to fool tests. Natural Products Insider’s senior editor Todd Runestad sat down with ABC’s founder, Mark Blumenthal, to discuss the risks at stake. Tune in to discover:

- How saw palmetto is being spiked with help from the animal slaughter trade.

- What manufacturers can do to prevent rejected raw materials from re-entering the trade.

- Whether blockchain can be a viable tool to ensure trustworthiness in the trade.

On Thursday, July 9, from 2:00-2:30pm Eastern time, tune in to a related webinar with NOW Foods CEO Jim Emme on Challenges in the botanical ingredient supply chain: Opportunities for manufacturers to create change. Click here to register for this free event, courtesy your business partners here at Natural Products Insider.

Plenty of former and current professional athletes advocate for the use of CBD in sports nutrition, and many of them have launched their own line of supplements or topical products in this space. However, selling CBD products to athletes is both riskier and less risky than selling CBD products to other demographics. To explain this conundrum, Rick Collins, partner at Collins Gann McCloskey & Barry, joins Sandy Almendarez, content director, Informa Markets, on this podcast to discuss the legal aspects of selling CBD in sports nutrition products.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set up to assess and approve single synthetic chemical constituent pharmaceutical drugs—drug, after all, is its middle name. But food is its first name, yet the agency has a great deal of difficulty regulating dietary supplements, in particular botanicals with many different active phytochemicals in a plant, and especially hemp CBD with one ingredient in particular, THC, being a controlled substance drug! So it’s a challenging scenario all the way around, from the regulators to the would-be regulated. Natural Products Insider senior editor Todd Runestad digs into these important—and vexing—issues with Duffy MacKay, senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for CV Sciences, a pioneering and leading brand known for its PlusCBD Oil line. Tune in and listen to the pair discuss some provocative issues, including:

What does regulatory compliance look like to a hemp CBD company?

What else looks different in the hemp CBD world compared to the larger dietary supplements business?

Crystal ball question: What do ultimate hemp CBD regulations might look like? Pharma only? Food allowed? Upper safe limits established? No isolate?

MacKay will be leading a discussion with many of the hemp CBD industry’s leading legal minds, in a webinar, “Legal, regulatory and market forces shaping the hemp CBD industry,” Thursday, July 2, from 2-3pm Eastern time, 11-12 Pacific. To register, go to naturalproductsinsider.com and atop the home page, on that bar, click on Media Assets, then Webinars, and scroll down till you see the title, and register.

Research is only in its infancy in cannabinoid research, though it is clear they have benefit. The future may portend new tricks in product formulation. Yes, we will continue to discover new individual cannabinoids, a la CBD isolate that’s been approved as a pharmaceutical drug by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We will also see blending combinations of individual cannabinoids. We will also see increased research on the so-called entourage effect--the mixture of all the cannabinoids inside the cannabis plant—even, yes, with THC. There will also be deeper looks at the terpenes. And also, the blending of hemp with complementary botanicals. The future is truly wide open. Join Informa senior editor Todd Runestad as he takes a deep dive into the hemp fields with Jason Mitchell, co-founder and president of hemp pioneering company HempFusion, as they look beyond CBD and go into:

• Why is CBG not only an emerging cannabinoid but is in fact the mother of all cannabinoids?

• Beta-caryophyllene and the aromatic terpenes.

• CBD is not ‘more is better.’ CBD is ‘better is better.’ It’s not about how much you take, it’s did it work?

Jason Mitchell will be moderating a SupplySide webinar, “Hemp cannabinoids: CBD (and THC) aren’t the half of it.” This will be broadcast Tuesday, June 30. To tune in, go to naturalproductsinsider.com and right up near the top, on the right, click “Media Assets” and “Webinars” and find the webinar.

The Organic & Natural Health Association (O&N), with research support from Grassroots Health, submitted a health claim petition to FDA regarding vitamin D’s role in reducing preterm births. According to Karen Howard, CEO and executive director of O&N, this petition was denied because FDA said the studies didn’t account for the vitamin D participants received through sunlight exposure. Rather than walk away defeated, Howard and her Association made lemonade out of lemons, by supporting the substantiation of a structure/function claim, which currently appears on Simply GOODHEALTH’s Vitamin D3 label. In this podcast with Sandy Almendarez, content director, Informa Markets, Howard tells the tale of the structure/function claim development and what lessons the rest of the industry can learn.