NaturPro Scientific

NaturPro Scientific Solve the mysteries of natural products.

In 2025, we’re celebrating 10 years as the go-to experts in strategy and ex*****on of R&D, regulatory and QA/QC for whatever’s in supplements 💊 health foods 🍎 cosmetics 🧴 botanicals 🌿 ingredients 🍚and more

03/09/2026

(filmed in January) In this episode of Food Planet Web, we unpack a surprising reality: the food industry didn’t just benefit from convenience culture—our h...

Everyone talks about quality.But many supplement ingredient deals still happen on lowest price and half-baked documentat...
03/03/2026

Everyone talks about quality.

But many supplement ingredient deals still happen on lowest price and half-baked documentation.

We say we value transparency — then spend weeks chasing COAs and specs that don’t actually cut the mustard.

Take Sea Moss (Chondrus crispus) as an example.

Wild-harvested from the North Atlantic. Naturally rich in marine bioactives. Used as a traditional food — and maybe something even more powerful.

But when we source sea moss, do we actually know it intimately? How do we know a particular batch isn’t diluted? What does the historical heavy metal profile look like? Where, exactly, was it harvested?

Buyers don’t have the time — or the expertise — to become specialists in every raw material.

And many suppliers only provide what buyers demand.

That leaves a gap nautical miles wide.

Someone independent — with integrity and expertise — has to draw a line in the sand and say:

*Here’s the standard for sea moss.*

(And then repeat that standard for every ingredient people aren’t completely sure about.)

That’s where the name — and the attitude — behind the Fearless Naturals USA Trust Marketplace comes from.

Because trust doesn’t live in a handshake or in a PDF.

Trust has to be built into a system that serves everyone — just one click away.

I’m heading to Natural Products Expo this week as a trail guide.Backpack on, maps loaded. Because the ingredient side of...
03/03/2026

I’m heading to Natural Products Expo this week as a trail guide.

Backpack on, maps loaded.

Because the ingredient side of products can feel like the wilderness. Beautiful and full of opportunity. But lots of places where people get lost.

The Fearless Naturals USA Trust Marketplace is being built around a simple idea: if we’re going to cross this terrain, we need better maps.

With clear origin. Verified purity and potency. Established specs. Transparent cost structures.

And the needed infrastructure to connect qualified buyers direct with producers.

With the Marketplace, you’ll be able to finally meet your farmer, and know your ingredients intimately.

——

I’ll also be advancing two connected efforts:

✅ BCOQ — Botanical Cost of Quality

Much of the botanical pricing in the industry ignores the full cost of production and quality.

And then we only get upset after finding failure.

BCOQ brings the pieces together, so buyers can finally understand what it actually costs to do botanicals right.

Quality has a floor, and we’re gonna help firms to calculate and educate on it

——

✅ The Ashwagandha Standards Alliance

If we don’t define the path forward intentionally, the market and the regulators will define it for us — at the lowest common denominator.

——-

Here’s the real reason I’m posting this:

I’m looking for top-tier ingredient suppliers, along with consumer product manufacturers and brands who want to help lead this expedition.

If you’re willing to:

❓Learn about the Fearless Trust Marketplace, a new type of supply and sourcing experience

❓Set benchmarks of ingredient pricing with defensible cost-of-quality modeling

❓Advance rational, science-based standards for ashwagandha that move the market forward…

….then let’s connect.

Buying supplement ingredients should be more like drafting NFL players.The NFL Combine is this week — and it’s a fitting...
02/27/2026

Buying supplement ingredients should be more like drafting NFL players.

The NFL Combine is this week — and it’s a fitting premise for what we’re building at Fearless Naturals USA.

—-

Professional athletes — just like ingredients that people consume for their health — are a big investment.

At the NFL Combine, prospects are measured, tested, scanned, interviewed, and timed. It exists for one reason: to maximize value and reduce uncertainty of a large investment.

—-

Now, step into the ingredient market, which looks little like the Combine.

Ingredient buyers are drafting from a mixed pool—midgets, high school, college, and pros — all thrown together. Many are just on paper, or missing key stats.

And they’re all in a dark room. Brokers sit next to long-established manufacturers. Well-audited GMP facilities compete with under-documented traders.

Spec sheets and COAs vary in validity and completeness.

Without an “Ingredient Combine”, price and availability become the loudest signal. And you might just end up drafting a Pop Warner to be your pro quarterback.

——

The Fearless Trust Marketplace is like the Combine — a missing layer needed for legitimacy.

In our system, suppliers must qualify to a high standard before they’re listed.

Specifications function as measurables to w**d out the chaff.

And audit trails and ongoing transparency ensure high performance.

The Marketplace is supplier qualification on steroids. It’s the furthest thing from a highlight reel or popularity contest.

It’s a league of its own for ingredients meeting the highest standards.

—-

We’re starting to onboard suppliers and buyers now, for launch in the spring

To be a part, complete this form: https://lnkd.in/gnnzr6DE

What’s the problem with ashwagandha?Turns out, nothing — as long as you’re following GMP’s and accurately labeling and t...
02/26/2026

What’s the problem with ashwagandha?

Turns out, nothing — as long as you’re following GMP’s and accurately labeling and testing your product.

Ashwagandha has been relied on to support human health for thousands of years. Recently, it has become one of the most widely used botanicals in global health and wellness.

Yet the science, safety interpretation, analytical methods, and regulatory dialogue surrounding it remains sometimes misleading.

Myself, Trish Flaster, and several other key stakeholders believe this valuable, safe and effective plant deserves better.

So, after about a year of work of intensive review, based on a foundation of hundreds of published studies, the Ashwagandha Standards Alliance is now formed.

Here’s what we’re promoting:

• Evidence-based safety grounded in the full body of toxicological and clinical data

• Harmonized, validated analytical standards for strength, purity, and potency

• Transparent labeling and traceable sourcing practices

• Clear communication for regulators, clinicians, industry, and the public

This group is not a trade association or a marketing coalition. It is a scientifically anchored, globally credible initiative to review and communicate scientifically rigorous standards for one of the world’s most important botanicals.

We are seeking to advance the global scientific integrity, safety assurance, and analytical standardization of Withania somnifera products through collaborative research, validated methodologies, and transparent quality practices.

Our vision is a consistent understanding of quality and transparency for ashwagandha — communicated consistently across markets.

Ashwagandha deserves standards that meet its global use — and usefulness for consumers.

If you are committed to rigor, openness, and long-term stewardship of ashwagandha, we invite you to follow the Ashwagandha Standards Alliance page on LinkedIn, and join the conversation.

We’ll be at Natural Products Expo in Anaheim next week to introduce the Alliance, so DM me to schedule a chat.

Let’s build durable standards for ashwagandha — together.

You might think your n=1 story is artful persuasion, but I might think you’re just pi***ng in my Cheerios. Here’s why.Be...
02/12/2026

You might think your n=1 story is artful persuasion, but I might think you’re just pi***ng in my Cheerios.

Here’s why.

Because when I’m reading your story, it’s not about you — it’s about me.

When I read or hear you saying that keto healed your issue, or magnesium fixed your anxiety, it might sound like data to you.

But to me, that’s just your autobiography—filtered through your body, your history, your season of stress, sleep, deficiency, genetics, and inflammation.

And I’ve got my own issues to deal with that are different than yours.

So of course you will feel transformed, while I feel nothing.

Because our biology and our lived experiences were never identical to begin with.

—-

We accept this variability in life, in politics and religion — or at least many of us do.

Different upbringing, fears, and hopes shape how two people can see the same evidence—a policy, a scripture, a supplement—and arrive at completely different certainty.

Your interpretation isn’t happening in the data. It’s happening inside you.

Science, too, also illuminates this uncomfortable truth: your n=1 sounds important to you, but tells the rest of us almost nothing.

No control. No generalizability to me or others. No way to know what would have happened without.

And yet emotionally for you, n=1 feels like healthy evangelism, like everything.

But your lived experience doesn’t outrank my interest in statistics — that is, how that might apply to me or to other people.

That’s why anecdotes on lifestyles, diets, supplements, politics, and religion all start to rhyme in the head of rational people sometimes.

—-

Anecdotes still matter—they’re signals and starting points.

But when anecdotes become sales which become doctrine, that’s when risk — and selfishness — hides in plain sight.

(Especially in diet and supplements, where individual variability is enormous, and certainty is sometimes marketed faster than evidence.)

Real trust lives in the difficult middle: respecting individual experience without abandoning science and rigor.

Because I prefer milk in my Cheerios, thank you very much.

February sunbeam + dog
02/11/2026

February sunbeam + dog

Iron is a fundamental micronutrient essential for oxygen transport, enzymatic activity, and metabolic homeostasis. Yet i...
01/20/2026

Iron is a fundamental micronutrient essential for oxygen transport, enzymatic activity, and metabolic homeostasis.

Yet it remains the most deficient nutrient in the world, with more than 2 billion people estimated with iron deficiency anemia.

In the diet, animal foods provide iron primarily as heme iron. Dietary heme iron is absorbed through the active transport pathways catalyzed by heme oxygenase in the intestinal enterocyte. This form of heme differs in its bioavailability, absorption mechanisms, and tolerability compared to non-heme forms of iron, including iron salts and chelates.

Adding more heme iron to a diet, including through iron supplements, may help to reduce the prevalence of iron deficiency.

Future research should focus on research of heme iron supplementation strategies to enhance absorption efficiency, gut microbiome health, and safety, ensuring optimal iron status across diverse populations.

I don’t usually sell supplements. But when I do, it’s after ten years of R&D, patents, clinical studies, production, qua...
01/19/2026

I don’t usually sell supplements.

But when I do, it’s after ten years of R&D, patents, clinical studies, production, quality control and market testing.

Three ingredients. One patented, synergistic combination. And thousands of happy dogs and cats.

Just Google PCQ Pet. Or check it out on Chewy

Thanks and deep appreciation to my friend and fellow animal lover, Dr. Geoff Pfeifer for staying the course.

All the talk about “shills” and false science due to conflicts of interest is, well, bull-shillt. When people don’t like...
01/13/2026

All the talk about “shills” and false science due to conflicts of interest is, well, bull-shillt.

When people don’t like scientific results, the most convenient (read: lazy) thing to claim is pollution by industry money.

And they remain in their La-Z-Boy for the next claim — that if industry stepped away, we’d get “purer” science.

I’m sorry to report that this couch-potato way of thinking about COI collapses under examination.

——

Today, industry funds roughly two-thirds of U.S. health R&D, representing around $250 billion.

Industry pays for early ideas, late-stage clinical trials, product development, regulatory science, manufacturing scale-up, quality assurance, and safety monitoring.

But let’s imagine industry funding somehow disappeared. And the government magically budgeted to replace all of it.

Taxpayer funding wouldn’t “clean things up”. Unless that means slower timelines, more failures, and even more politicized, bureaucratic decision-making.

We’d inherit $1,600 per average taxpayer in new debt — not couch-cushion change.

—

Industry funding is essential to putting government-funded science into practice. Which brings us to the second armchair complaint:

“Academics shouldn’t take industry money — it’s a conflict of interest.”

Most of the time, the money we’re talking about are relatively small payments to cover travel expenses, translate and present findings, and answer technical questions.

Few people in academia are paid for more than a reasonable amount for their time and expense to then explain what it means, and what’s next.

Someone has to do it - and neither universities nor government pay for that part.

Expecting academics to be the bridge between science and industry for free is both impractical and unethical.

For anyone wondering how the new Dietary Guidelines compare to the old, here’s a chart from Marion Nestle at FoodPolitic...
01/10/2026

For anyone wondering how the new Dietary Guidelines compare to the old, here’s a chart from Marion Nestle at FoodPolitics.com.

A cogent thing I missed in my earlier brief review - the new guidelines are a lot less quantitative than before.

Cups of fruits and vegetables turned to servings — yet fruits and vegetables don’t come labeled with serving sizes.

Is a serving 100 grams or a handful? It all depends, and no one really knows.

No limits on fat intake - which at 9 calories per gram can add up to, well, unwanted fat.

Had there been a Registered Dietitian on the expert panel, perhaps these oversights wouldn’t have been made.

(Shout out to all the RD’s who have to now parse through this, and then educate your patients with another change to the guidelines!)

-—

Article “The MAHA 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines have arrived: Cheerful, Muddled, Contradictory, Ideological, Retro”.

Link: https://lnkd.in/e8qm-3DE

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About NaturPro:

NaturPro Scientific, LLC, is a boutique natural products scientific consulting firm offering more than 30 years of experience and solutions supporting the development of innovative and functional products and ingredients that promote human health. NaturPro provides essential seed-to-shelf guidance covering innovation, research, production, supplier verification, quality assurance and regulatory compliance. NaturPro supports a range of startups, midsize and Fortune-50 corporations in the dietary supplement, food and beverage, and other regulated industries.

We Are Active Members of: --American Botanical Council --American Herbal Products Association (Standards, Raw Materials, Laboratory and Cannabis Committees) --AOAC International (Ethanol in Kombucha Expert Panel) --ASTM International (D.037 Cannabis Committee) --International Society of Sports Nutrition --U.S. H**p Roundtable (Technical Committee)

Recent Publications:


  • Determination of Ethanol Content in Kombucha Products by Gas Chromatography with Flame Ionization Detection: A Multilaboratory Study. Liu Y, Chan M, Ebersole B, Sy H, Brown PN. J AOAC Int. 2018 Sep 18. doi: 10.5740/jaoacint.18-0190.