As head farmer at Veritas Farms in Pueblo, Colo., Rianna Meyer has two big concerns when growing her 100,000 hemp plants, a form of cannabis closely related to marijuana.
One is making sure that plants don’t absorb any of the potentially harmful chemicals that might be in the soil. The other is how much of the plant’s two key compounds they contain: THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which gets users high, and CBD (cannabidiol), which is gaining increasing attention for its potential health benefits.
As it turns out, those are also two of the most important factors that consumers should consider when choosing among the thousands of CBD products now being sold across the country.
And those choices are soon likely to become even more confusing: The CBD market is expected to multiply at least sevenfold by 2021, to $2.15 billion, up from $292 million in 2016, according to the Brightfield Group, a market research firm that specializes in cannabis. Even Coca-Cola says it’s “closely watching” the growing interest in CBD and its potential as an ingredient in some of the company’s beverages.
When Buying CBD Gets Scary
But buyers beware: While there are tons of fantastic cannabis-based health and wellness products out there for purchase, CBD is still brand new and thus unregulated. Just like dietary supplements, the FDA doesn’t rigorously monitor the creation and distribution of CBD-so brands aren’t under strict scrutiny when it comes to how they concoct, label, and sell their cannabis creations. To buy cbd products you need a careful review. Purekana reviews , cureganics reviews .
“There’s a lot of great innovation going on right now, but because it’s a new industry, there’s also the fly-by-night players looking to make a quick buck,” said Joel Stanley, chairman and one of the founders of Charlotte’s Web CBD oil. “In fact, the FDA conducted their own study around CBD products and found that many don’t even contain CBD,” he said. “Knowing what’s in products is the major purchasing concern for new CBD consumers, and we believe that regulation and consumer education is so important right now.”
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in November 2017, found that about 26 percent of the CBD products they tested contained significantly less CBD per milliliter than the label advertised, which “could negate any potential clinical response.” Read: won’t do sh*t for your anxiety or pain, or give you any of CBD’s science-backed benefits.
