Supplement fraud

We Americans spend about $30 billion a year on dietary supplements. Yes, you read that right: $30 billion. This includes everything from the prosaic one-a-day vitamin pill to exotic herbal concoctions, from mineral blends to multisyllabic probiotics that you need a Latin scholar to translate, from fish oils to pulverized mushrooms, plus all manner of ancient elixirs, botanicals and an extraordinary variety of “essential” thises and “crucial” thats that we had no idea were either essential or crucial. Dietary supplements promise to cure what ails you: arthritis, cardiovascular disease, fibromyalgia, migraine, adrenal fatigue, failing eyesight, high cholesterol, low libido. They promise health and high-level wellness, boosted energy, enhanced concentration, and, of course, a litany of anti-aging benefits.

Protestations to the contrary, supplements and nutriceuticals are a largely unregulated industry – which is why I was neither shocked nor surprised at the report released Monday by the New York State Attorney General. In case you missed the news, the AGs office accused four major retailers of selling fraudulent and potentially dangerous herbal supplements and demanded that they remove the products from their shelves.

Here are some highlights from that report: A popular store brand of ginseng pills at Walgreens, promoted for “physical endurance and vitality,” contained only powdered garlic and rice. A gingko biloba supplement (the herb is touted as a memory enhancer) sold at Walmart contained only powdered radish, houseplants and wheat. Three out of six herbal products at Target — ginkgo biloba, St. John’s wort and valerian root, a sleep aid — contained none of the herbs listen on their respective labels.

In the world of supplements, it is absolutely caveat emptor. The buyers (us) should beware for two very BIG reasons: First, good, solid science about supplements is hard to find. Does ginko biloba enhance memory? Does ginseng increase vitality? We really don’t know. The careful, long-term studies that would investigate such health effects are extraordinarily expensive and not particularly attractive to Big Pharma (which undertakes and funds much of the pills-for-ills research) because there’s not much money to be made manufacturing pills that contain unpatentable herbal substances.

The second reason we should be on high alert speaks directly to the New York AG’s report about fraud. The supplement industry is, as I’ve said, pretty much unregulated. The FDA “regulates” dietary supplements as a category of food, not drugs. Pharmaceutical companies that manufacture and sell drugs are required to obtain FDA approval before bringing the drug to market, which involves assessing risks and benefits – generally through extensive, wide-scale testing, first in the lab, then in lab animals and then in humans. Manufacturers of dietary supplements, on the other hand, do not need to be pre-approved by the FDA before marketing their wares. If there’s a new ingredient in the supplement, the manufacturer notifies the FDA beforehand, giving the agency 75 days to do a little homework. Basically, it’s the FDA’s responsibility to prove that the supplement is unsafe, not the manufacturer’s responsibility to prove it is safe.

But really it is our responsibility to be as knowledgeable as we can be about supplements – both their potential health benefits (look here) and their purity (look here).