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ALTERNATIVEMEDICINE.COM
Writing a New Chapter in
HERBAL HEALING FOODS THAT BOOST IMMUNITY APRIL 2019 • ISSUE 45
HAPPINESS IS OBESITY GOOD FOR AND THE YOU MICROBIOME
WRITING A NEW CHAPTER IN
H E R BA L H E A L I N G Paul and Barbi Schulick reflect on the development of the natural products industry and look toward the next chapter in their lives. INTERVIEW BY DICK BENSON 20
| DECEMBER 2018
• Alternative Medicine
PAUL: We started making herbal extracts
Alternative Medicine recently sat down with Paul and Barbi Schulick, founders of New Chapter vitamins and herbal supplements, to discuss the history of New Chapter, the growth of the natural products industry, why they remained involved for 6 years after the New Chapter acquisition by Proctor & Gamble, and what comes next for the couple.
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE (AM): How
did you become interested in natural products and natural healing? PAUL: I believe it started when I was four years old going on house-calls with my pediatrician dad. He was a deep inspiration to me, being one of those rare physicians who led with his heart, and though conventional in his craft, innately trusted in nature. I always wanted to mirror him but when I attempted pre-med in college I soon veered away from the allopathic and embraced herbal healing as my path. BARBI: Paul and I met as meditation teachers. In our early twenties we were both drawn to explore our inner landscape, seeking a wholeness of mind, body and spirit. This commitment to wholeness in healing gave rise to New Chapter and has proven to be a lifelong passion that is now informing our next venture. My dad, who was an entrepreneur, was also a player in our choices. I grew up around a family business, so it came naturally for me to partner with Paul on our livelihood. My dad loaned us the money to buy a little health-foods store in 1979 and that experience in retail is what inspired and gave us the first impetus to create New Chapter.
in 1982 out of our store in Lexington, Mass. This was at a time when herbals were not widely used and vitamins were more what customers looked for. But we and many of our customers found the standard USP vitamins on our shelves often ineffective and hard to digest and so I sought out a truly healthy alternative. That’s when we began our decades-long fascination with fermentation and introduced our first new chapter: fermented vitamins and minerals with herbal extracts tucked into the product so we could get people benefiting from herbs who wouldn’t necessarily buy them separately. BARBI: We called that our Trojan-horse effect. The theme for Paul’s whole career has been to be a paradigm-shifting agent, pioneering new innovations, and raising consciousness in the industry. We were the first to ferment whole-food nutrients which set us apart from vitamins as isolated chemicals, with vitamins and herbals together in a whole-food fermented form, which is what gave New Chapter its name. We wanted nutrients that were easily assimilated by the body and could be called food and seen as food by the body. PAUL: Later on I became fascinated with ginger and bought an organic farm in Costa Rica so we could grow our own. I was frustrated with the preponderance of product dipped in pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides and focused on going straight to the source if I couldn’t get the quality I wanted. I wrote a book on ginger in 1994, and the research was a good year-and-a-half to two-year project. I think my father instilled the imperative for research and science in me. In a way I was always proving to Dad that herbs were valuable medicine. And it was worthwhile research because according to the leading pharmacologists at the time, ginger was one of the most important botanicals from a science perspective. Later on I came to see that to unleash the real beauty of ginger, I needed to extract it with technology that wouldn’t require any heat or chemical solvents.
So I brought the first super-critical ginger extract to the United States from Germany, and then followed with turmeric, rosemary, and oregano. Those different extracts were delivered in the form of Zyflamend in 1999, which ended up being the leading herbal multi that could help people suffering from inflammatory conditions. My partner at the time, Tom Newmark and I wrote a book called Beyond Aspirin to support the research behind this formula. In 2010, we received, through Tom’s leadership, the Varro E. Tyler award from the American Botanical Council. We were the first US company to be awarded the prestigious science award because of the work we had done at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Columbia University, Cleveland Clinic, Cornell, and University of Tennessee. We had brought forward a whole new expectation from our consumers to not only provide the most exclusively extracted and derived raw materials, but also champion the science that would confirm the integrity of the product. For example, we’ve learned that seventy-five percent of reishi mushroom products aren’t even Reishi, and that thirty or forty percent of grapeseed products are either adulterated or not even grapeseed. So, in an industry which needs to look itself in the mirror on its quality standards, I think we were able to advance the reputation of the industry as a whole. AM: New Chapter has been a pioneer in so many ways in the natural-products industry. In particular, you’re one of the early natural-product companies that agreed to an acquisition by a traditional consumer products company, like P&G. To stick around for 6 years, you must have had some good feelings about the whole thing. PAUL: We were clearly one of the
first major acquisitions of that kind, yes, and the first for P&G as well, in our marketplace. I think the most considerable opportunity available to me as a formulator from the acquisition—as an herbal student and alternativemedicine.com • APRIL 2019
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aficionado—was the opportunity to do deeper work in science, and thereby to potentially reach more people. One of the beautiful things that P&G did is it invested a significant amount of research dollars to validate that our Reishi was actually Reishi along with efficacy work that showed that all our mushrooms would actually have superior biological activity. There were some bright and motivated individuals that came from the acquisition. So, I felt it had a fair amount of promise to it. AM: How have you seen the natural-
products industry change from 1997 to now? BARBI: Our industry got its roots—and we were certainly part of those roots starting out in the late 70s—from what was widely in the culture at the time. The peace-loving back to nature movement gave rise to a lot of folks like ourselves who wanted to find inspired, heart-led work that challenged norms and helped the world, what is now referred to as mission-driven. PAUL: The current surge of this industry is very gratifying on one end and a little scary on the other. When there’s money to be made, there’s a higher likelihood that chicanery is going to enter the picture. There’s also an immense amount of repetition. What’s interesting is that at the start the people who were innovating and creating new products were really authentic. Now it’s dizzying because not only are there so many of the same things on the shelves, but there are a lot of instances in which money has become the central focus. There’s nothing wrong with money, but it’s similar to when medicine became essentially a business and when Medicare came in. My dad said, “The way the system is steering, I can only spend ten or fifteen minutes with a patient now, rather than the hour or the hour-and-a-half that they need. Healing needs that kind of care and that kind of patient attention. When it becomes vastly industrialized and profit-oriented, the consumer is more in jeopardy because you really don’t know whether
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• Alternative Medicine
We started making herbal extracts in 1982 out of our store in Lexington, Mass. This was at a time when herbals were not widely used and vitamins were more what customers looked for. But we and many of our customers found the standard USP vitamins on our shelves often ineffective and hard to digest and so I sought out a truly healthy alternative. That’s when we began our decades-long fascination with fermentation and introduced our first “new chapter”: fermented vitamins and minerals with herbal extracts tucked into the product so we could get people benefiting from herbs who wouldn’t necessarily buy them separately.
you are going to get what you need or what you don’t need. One of my mantras always was, “make it for myself.” We made many of our own products in our kitchen. Barbi, our kids, and I relied upon that. So, do you think I would use a nonorganic or a non-biodynamically grown herb, or I wouldn’t extract it just perfectly? That’s the kind of dedication that you’d find in some of the innovative companies in the late 70s. But now it’s just a plethora of the same things. I find it often distracting or unnecessary. There’s two reasons why I think the industry hasn’t received the recognition and the success that it could. One is that most companies do not take quality control seriously and therefore many of the products have relatively poor quality, and secondly, the government and the big industry—the big medical industrial complex—which influences the doctors and the pharmaceuticals
and the regulatory agencies, basically have formed a union which ultimately restricts, in my judgment, free speech about what herbs and natural remedies are capable of doing. That’s one of the biggest hopes that I have moving forward into my next enterprise…to be able to speak more candidly and openly about the healthcare system and what contributions need to be made. For example, with Zyflamend, we had research at Cornell showing that it had an impact on breast-cancer cells, we had research at Columbia showing Zyflamend had an impact on prostate-cancer cells. We had human clinical trials that were underway. In a phase-one clinical FDA trial it was proven that the product was not only safe, but also could be potentially useful in a pre-cancerous prostate condition, and we were preparing for an approved phase-two trial. That’s the kind of investment that a lot of companies are not prepared to make in the regulatory environment today. So instead, a man with a prostate condition has to go through sometimes unnecessary surgeries and so forth, when they should be taking herbals like Zyflamend. The regulatory environment, however, doesn’t allow you to tell those kinds of stories, because there’s just too much lobbying going on and not enough truth being told. AM: You’ve seen a huge evolution in how dietary supplements are sold. The Internet is probably the top source. You used to have to go into a local health food store, talk to someone who was knowledgeable, and they could make recommendations about products. PAUL: It’s a great question, and it’s very provocative. Because what you’re steering towards is the direction it has to take in order for our industry to be successful. When I saw models starting to grow like Pharmaca, for example, or some of the hybrid pharmacy models where trained professionals engage in the conventional world as well as the herbal
world. This is the real opportunity for this industry. According to the World Health Organization, the number one country in healthy life expectancy is Japan; number 41 is the United States. Japan specializes not only in the Western medical approach, like the United States has, but seventy-five percent of the doctors are also trained in herbal medicine. So, to me that is the direction that we have to take, true complementary medicine. I think that a philosophy around herbal healing is important. When you take one component out of the context of the whole, you have to be careful that you are making sure that you’re delivering the safest or the most efficacious formulation. That’s where expert herbalism comes in. I do get concerned when you start delivering highly concentrated extracts, like those containing very high levels of EGCG and other catechins in green tea. You end up potentially disrupting natural balances that occur within the body. So I get more concerned when we start getting more and more highly isolated herbal preparations. It is my hope that more doctors emerge like Andrew Weil, MD, for example, who started training integrative medical doctors. Although there are beautiful spots like the Cleveland Clinic right now with Mark Hyman, MD, the change is still unbelievably slow from my perspective, even though I’ve been at it for 40 years. You need to have people who are highly trained in dietary supplements and in nutrition in order to give people life-changing advice. Now, because that has not been widely adopted, you’re getting people searching the Internet and not having the expertise or the knowledge to differentiate how much vitamin D they need or what a good brand of vitamin D is, for example. They’re left choosing the least expensive. Sometimes that’s okay, but I defer to one of my favorite expressions: “The most expensive supplement is the one that doesn’t work.” The Internet has a huge role to play in education of alternative
medicine, but legitimate companies sharing knowledge and the truth, in the current regulatory environment, proves challenging at times. AM: Okay, so not to use a pun, but what’s the next chapter in your life? PAUL: I think the next adventure is really to continue what I have done and make use of all the relationships I’ve built through the years. I am close to some of the leaders in botanical medical production: people who are masters of fermentation and extraction. My relationships have grown with time, as has my knowledge. So I’m going to bring everything that I have learned with herbal healing into that next chapter which we have named For The Biome. (forthebiome.com) I expect in the second quarter of 2019 to deliver a whole new introduction to healing products particularly focused on the microbiome of the skin, an area I’m
We named the company For The Biome to serve biomes, or communities, of all kinds: the microscopic biomes of the skin and body, our local and global biomes, and through For The Biome, we will honor the spiritual biome we all share. One of the things about For The Biome that we’re most excited about is setting up a structure to facilitate giving back. We want a meaningful percentage of revenue to go to aligned philanthropic causes in housing and climate change. We also hope to be employeeowned, and plan to be radically transparent about our sourcing. One of our adages has always been that your culture and your impact on the world is informed by what’s in “your bottle.”
having an incredible fascination with. The skin is not only our largest organ, but as some scientists have declared, it’s our “third brain.” Nourishing and healing the skin can actually contribute to ultimately healing the body. Skincare products, in general, even the natural ones, are not innovating in disruptive ways that are designed to approach the whole body. I expect to deliver some radical new approaches into this category and by mid-2020, I plan to reenter the nutraceuticals arena with a next generation of microbiome or holistically oriented formulations. BARBI: We named the company For The Biome to serve biomes, or communities, of all kinds: the microscopic biomes of the skin and body, our local and global biomes, and through the om in biome, we will honor the spiritual biome we all share. One of the things about For The Biome that we’re most excited about is setting up a structure to facilitate giving back. We want a meaningful percentage of revenue to go to aligned philanthropic causes in housing and climate change. We also hope to be employee-owned, and plan to be radically transparent about our sourcing. One of our adages has always been that your culture and your impact on the world is informed by what’s in “your bottle.” We are also already integrating our love and strong belief in the power of meditation into our small team along with freely offered phonemeditations for the broader community, which speaks to our desire to raise consciousness towards a better world. A big thrust behind For The Biome will be to educate and enlighten around personal and global health. I feel a kind of resonance between boomers like ourselves who created mission-driven businesses and are still at it, or starting over again, with a lot of the millennials who are also out there starting wonderful new enterprises that come from the heart and aim to create a better world. That gives me hope. If there’s anything that our industry deserves, it’s more of that. AM
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