Interview by Sheldon Baker
Greg Cumberford has a 30-plus year career as a natural products industry executive and thought leader in regenerative, vertically-integrated botanical wellness solutions including Ahiflower® oil. He serves as vice president science and regulatory with Natures Crops International. His career includes botanical products farming and sourcing, R&D, quality, new product innovation, clinical study management, and manufacturing. Cumberford regularly authors articles on plant-based health science, clinical research, R&D, and functional applications. He has a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Earth Science from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa). (Adv Mind Body Med. 2024;38(3):56-59.)
Sheldon Baker is an InnoVision contributing editor. His freelance editorial content can also be found in several lifestyle publications, and as CEO of Baker Dillon Group LLC, he has created numerous brand marketing communications and public relations campaigns for health and wellness organizations. Contact him at [email protected].
Advances in Mind-Body Medince (Advances): Please provide an overview of Natures Crop International, the leading supplier of Ahiflower oil.
Greg Cumberford: We are the reason that Ahiflower oil exists. Natures Crops International is a specialty oil seed crops grower, producer, and seller. Ahiflower is our flagship product. For years, Natures Crops has also grown and processed oils like meadowfoam seed and Abyssinian oils, and others which are used in the topical skin care industry. But ahiflower was the result of our British CEO and Founder, Andrew Hebard, taking a keen interest in finding what could be a sustainable, terrestrial, and regeneratively grown alternative to marine sourced Omegas. In the late nineties, his interactions with one of his mentors, UK-based Professor Keith Coupland, foresaw that there would be a challenge in meeting global Omega 3 demands from a sustainability standpoint. Professor Coupland counseled Andrew to investigate natural plant-based sources of Omega 3, primarily stearidonic acid. Back then, it was known to be an academic curiosity that there was a plant called Buglossoides arvensis which had the richest, naturally occurring stearidonic acid levels but the oil had no prior history of human use in any country’s medicinal or nutritional compendial references and needed to be developed first from primary research.
Advances: Ahiflower is a trademarked name?
Mr. Cumberford: Yes. Ahiflower® is the trademark name that Natures Crop has given to its cultivated varieties and to the resulting oil. It had no prior history of human use. The oil comes from the seeds of the plant which is in the borage family. It is a family of plants that provides other oils like borage and herbs like comfrey which were already in traditional commerce prior to Natures Crops going through the painstaking process of developing Buglossoides arvensis.
IMCJ: It has been grown in the UK, but not in the in U.S.?
Mr. Cumberford: It is exclusively commercially grown by Natures Crops only in the UK presently. The Buglossoides plant exists in the northern hemisphere as a weed species that grows among wheat fields. Wherever wheat farming happens, Buglossoides often appears under its common name, Field Gromwell. It is a spindly little plant that a farmer would never want to intentionally grow. Natures Crops in partnership with NIAB, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, England, developed something robust that had much higher yields and an even better fatty acid composition of the oil in the seeds.
Advances: How was it known that it could be incorporated into health products?
Mr. Cumberford: Andrew Hebard and the NCI team back then conducted the primary research. They discovered how to get higher levels of Omega 3 stearidonic acid in the seeds naturally. Researchers globally were aware of it, but not from the standpoint of human health or use. It took Hebard’s team to bring it to where it was possible from an agronomic and fatty acid composition standpoint to have potential nutritional value.
Advances: What did they find?
Mr. Cumberford: They found it had to be developed through much trial and error, and then it needed global regulatory approval, a process which took over 12 years. The European Union was the first to grant regulatory approval.
Advances: The Ahiflower brand is still relatively unknown. Is there a reason for lack of awareness or is it the trust level in a regenerative plant source as an alternative Omega 3?
Mr. Cumberford: It’s because it has only been in commerce for about eight years. We gained the first trade recognition starting with a few early adopting brands in 2016-17, and it has taken a while to gain traction. It’s like the percolation of water into a relatively dry, parched soil. It’s taken time to gain broader awareness in different categories of commerce. Starting out in dietary supplements, there’s now over 100 brands around the world that have Ahiflower, either as the sole ingredient or as part of an overall formulation. We’re still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how it will flourish. We’re seeing a lot of interest and awareness growing in North America, including in pet and equine products. Purina now has an Ahiflower oil product called Omega Match for horses. Wagwell has a line of products for dogs.
There is greater interest because the newest brand launches are much broader and bigger. Awareness is also spreading through healthcare practitioners. A presentation that I recently gave with Dr. Patrick Hanaway, MD at the Integrative Healthcare Symposium was compelling and is showing that there is a different therapeutic role for Ahiflower versus conventional EPA/DHA sources.
Further, Natures Crops was recently nominated for the Earthshot Prize which exists to discover, spotlight, and help grow innovative solutions that are working to repair and regenerate the planet.
Advances: What are the major ahiflower brands in the human supplement category?
Mr. Cumberford: The biggest plant powered brands in the U.S. would be ProCaps Labs, Wiley’s Finest, and Nouri, which are wellness brands carried in the mass market.
There are also Bold Botanica, Clean Machine, and Greens First products using ahiflower. Bold Botanica’s holding company Apotheca has a practitioner brand and several consumer brands. The practitioner brand is called Energique, and the consumer product is Bold Plant Omega 3-6-9. Greens First Ahiflower is available in the chiropractic and integrative practitioner market through Fullscript.
Advances: So, supplement brands are starting to take notice.
Mr. Cumberford: Yes. Greater awareness will help stimulate growth. Nevertheless, keep in mind the supply chain dynamics and the turbulence that’s happened in conventional marine based Omegas. The industry is learning that warming ocean temperatures are driving down the fat content of marine omega-3 forage fish species like Peruvian anchoveta from 3-4% to less than 0.5%. So just as global aquaculture omega-3 demand is rising (to feed farmed salmon and meet their omega-3 EPA/DHA needs), dwarfing nutraceutical supplement demand by 400%, it will put even more pressure on available wild-caught marine sources and ecosystems while driving end product supplement prices higher. Sustainable terrestrially farmed sources and algal sources have to fill the gaps. Ahiflower will play a role.
Advances: There are major metabolic differences between plant-based and traditional Omega 3.
Mr. Cumberford: Ahiflower is the richest dietary source of combined alpha linolenic acid and stearidonic acid at about 65%. But ahiflower is also a rich source of gamma linolenic acid on the Omega 6 side. From a delivery standpoint of fatty acids, with its SDA plus GLA combination, both those fatty acids bypass the hepatic delta 6 to saturase rate limiting step, and they supply a wider range of anti-inflammatory oxylipin precursors than you would get from traditional EPA/DHA sources alone.
Ahiflower’s fatty acids metabolize differently because they are providing more intermediates to cell membranes coming from ALA through SDA to ETA, eicosatetraenoic acid, and then onward to EPA/DPA/DHA. We are learning about Ahiflower synthesizing DHA efficiently in key tissues like the liver and brain comparably to pure marine DHA, even though it doesn’t raise circulating DHA levels. This respects the body’s inherent capacity to efficiently deploy plant-base precursor Omega-3’s to tissue DHA as and when needed. Plus, you are getting with ahiflower the anti-inflammatory Omega 6 GLA and DGLA metabolites which appear in humans and animals to form preferentially over arachidonic acid (ARA) and which are not in typical fish or algal EPA/DHA oils. This is why many brands and practitioners have found it to be complete and balanced, providing a more diverse array of anti-inflammatory oxylipin precursors, not just those you find forming from EPA and DHA. In fact, a recently published human crossover trial (Seidel U 2024) that just came out in Frontiers in Nutrition recognizes this. The authors stated, “Plant-derived ahiflower oil efficiently increases plasma EPA and corresponding eicosanoids and causes a distinct shift in the entire oxylipin pattern…”
Because of these recently published studies, it’s the first time ahiflower has been recognized widely as a sustainable alternative Omega 3 source. The University of Southampton is one of the leading research centers for immune lipid metabolism under the direction of Professor Philip Calder. The new Seidel human dietary trial was reviewed by Southampton’s Dr. Ella Baker (also cited above). This mounting scientific recognition for ahiflower is wonderful and addresses practitioner concerns about plant-based vs EPA/DHA sources.
Advances: Plant-based omega products versus traditional sources still have a hurdle.
Mr. Cumberford: Yes. That’s one of the factors that I feel has impeded the growth of Ahiflower. It gets lumped in with ALA sources like flax or chia. While ahiflower is a good source of ALA, its rich stearidonic acid content sets it apart, for example, with systemic formation of interleukin 10 (IL-10). Naturally upregulating IL-10 is part of the body’s natural, anti-inflammatory response to everything from intensive exercise to seasonal immune challenges to neuro-inflammation. There’s a body of published literature that is consistently recognizing that ahiflower is stimulating IL-10 and reducing the interleukin 6 to IL-10 ratio. Ahiflower also reduces the ARA to EPA ratio which is another proxy measure for overall inflammation status in the body. We’re seeing how Ahiflower is behaving in the body in ways that are both highly beneficial, but also different than what you see from pure EPA or DHA sources, yet in some ways overlapping as well.
Stearidonic acid has its own published research recognition for having similar anti-inflammatory cell signaling and cell membrane functions as DHA itself. It comes down to practitioners recommending Ahiflower to patients who are vegan, or vegetarian or who don’t want to take fish oil, or to patients with more complex etiologies in gut microbiome balancing as well as recognizing the beneficial effects from interleukin 10 upregulation.
Ahiflower is shown to significantly upregulate EPA—up to four times more efficiently than flaxseed oil and tripling plasma levels in the latest human trial above. That’s half of the quest in terms of EPA and DHA. Now the latest science published a few months ago from the University of Toronto, showed that ahiflower is able to match DHA for forming new DHA in the body in key tissues like the liver and brain in mice.
Advances: In your estimation, Ahiflower is better than fish oil.
Mr. Cumberford: I’d say, Ahiflower is beyond fish oil. I feel it’s qualitatively better from a planetary perspective because with eight billion humans, many are deficient in Omega 3 and the oceans cannot remotely supply them sustainably, factoring global aquaculture’s needs on top. Even the largest trade association GOED recognizes that we have to take an all-hands-on deck approach to sustainably improve Omega 3 status in humans, and in that respect ahiflower has a definite role to play. It is complementary to fish oil on how it can upregulate EPA and provide DHA efficiently into key tissues. It also boosts those oxylipin precursors like ETA and DGLA, which you would not get from fish oil.
Advances: Is the entre plant used in making the finish product?
Mr. Cumberford: No. The seeds are harvested. They’re grown regeneratively and then they’re combine harvested. The oil is coming from the seed. But ahiflower seed does have its own interesting nutritional aspects. It happens to be one of the richest sources of combined calcium and silica and our company is developing seed products. It is intended principally for the animal supplementation arena combining low glycemic metabolism and digestible insoluble fiber benefits as well as mineral benefits. There’s a forthcoming university study with poultry layer hens where they’re fed either the whole seed in a milled form, or the press cake (an upcycled seed byproduct form), to poultry hens. We’re seeing beneficial effects of boosted egg yolk Omega 3 content, egg productivity, and shell strength. Why that wraps around back to humans is that another key difference between fish oil and ahiflower oil is that it can be incorporated as an ingredient in foods, including plant-based foods, much more easily than fish oil and also algal oil because they’re much less oxidatively stable than Ahiflower oil.
Advances: How are sustainability and regenerative factors addressed?
Mr. Cumberford: If the world increasingly adopted ahiflower so it occupied even 10% of the Omega 3 supply chain, it would be truly transformative from a soil health and rural farmland biodiversity standpoint, as well as from an ocean health standpoint, because we’d be removing more and more of this pressure on what is already demonstrably a climate stressed supply chain. Ahiflower production can be scaled immensely while remaining regeneratively grown.
Advances: What applications are there for health professionals?
Mr. Cumberford: The primary applications are the same as for Omega 3 supplementation, but also factoring in the GLA side. We are primarily looking at cardiovascular, immune, joint mobility functions, mood, and cognitive support along with addressing complex gut dysbiosis etiologies. Those tend to be the primary applications. There is also good support for anti-neuroinflammatory physiological benefits. That was the study for which Patrick Hanaway, MD, as the observing physician and co-author, recognized Ahiflower as a key synergist for cognitive performance, in a R-DBPC human dietary trial published in 2023.
Advances: You have had quite a distinguished career evaluating ahiflower and plant-based ingredients.
Mr. Cumberford: I have spent more than 30 years in botanical plant-based wellness, and I was brought in as part of a team to help evaluate whether Ahiflower should be introduced to the world. I helped write the business plan that led Natures Crops’ board of directors to agree to go forward with Ahiflower in 2013. I am passionately behind this because I feel it will make an enormous difference with personal and planetary wellness outcomes, in respect to regenerative farming and what is happening in all of those cycles. I just hope to live long enough to see that it really has made a difference.
I have been with Natures Crops for 11 years. It’s a small company with fewer than 30 employees. We believe we’re here to make a difference and our B Corp certification speaks to that. We believe we’re at a paradigm shift in terms of both human and animal wellness, and we have to be mindful how we approach meeting essential physiological and mental wellness needs. Our hope is that health professionals will lead people to see Ahiflower’s role. It is a truly co-evolved and full spectrum way of achieving excellent Omega 3 status.