Dietary supplements - or rather the dangers of dietary supplements - continue to dominate the news of late.
Lamar Odom’s ordeal brought public attention to the dangers of “herbal viagra” and a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that unregulated dietary supplements cause tens of thousands of ER visits have both generated national headlines on the dangers of these products.
Many smaller studies also have brought attention to the fact that many of these products don’t actually work.
For those who adhere to sound science, none of this is new. The American Council on Science and Health has been asking for supplements to be tested for safety and efficacy in a similar way are pharmaceuticals for a long time, a point that is made concisely by Dr. Gil Ross and Dr. Henry Miller of the ACSH over on Forbes blogs.
As Drs. Ross and Miller explain, the main obstacle to reforming the supplement industry is the infamous Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which has been ferociously defended by Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). But the reforms are necessary to improve public health and save lives.
One salient example the two physicians use to argue for reform is the seemingly innocuous-sounding compound citrus aurantium (aka bitter orange). The compound is purported by the supplement industry to “support”–the buzzword du jour of the industry which gives them license to say whatever they want–weight loss. However, the chemical makeup of bitter orange is very similar to the banned substance ephedrine, which makes the substance actually very dangerous.
The physicians point out that due to this similarity the bitter orange should actually be banned, but thanks to DSHEA the substance can be added to whatever product the industry wants.
This is not to say that all supplements are dangerous or that they are all ineffective. Science advocates simply want all products that are advertised as medicine to be treated as medicine. The rules for bringing a chemotherapy agent to market to treat cancer should also apply to supplements that claim to prevent the cancer.
In the past many have argued that even if the supplements don’t work, they are generally made with safe, “natural” compounds, but that as never been true, a point expertly made in the Ross and Miller article poignantly title “Death by Dietary Supplement.”
Top image: supplements via shutterstock
