Irwin Naturals Inc., a leading maker of dietary supplements, has agreed to pay $2.65 million to settle civil charges alleging it failed to warn consumers that several of its products contain lead.
Prosecutors from 10 California counties who brought the charges said it was the largest settlement ever in an unfair business practices case against a supplement manufacturer in California. The settlement also covers claims that Irwin Naturals misled consumers by selling Hoodia weight-loss products that didn’t actually contain the prized African herb after which the supplements are named.
The Los Angeles-based company stressed that none of its products contained unsafe levels of lead but California’s Proposition 65 “requires a warning label for any product that contains an identifiable amount of a chemical or heavy metal on a daily dose basis.” The amount of lead considered unsafe in a product “is about 28 times greater than the level at which a warning on a label is required,” the company said.
The Prop 65 threshold is exposure to more than half a microgram of lead per day. Prosecutors said in their news release that samples of two Irwin Naturals products, System Six and Green Tea Fat Meltdown, tested up to 10 times over the legal limit, and another, Green Tea Fat Burner, tested 14 times over the limit.
The charges against Irwin Naturals arose from an investigation by a task force of district attorneys from the 10 counties created to investigate health claims by dietary pill makers. It initially focused on Irwin’s claims about products including Fast Action Hoodia Diet and 10 Day Hoodia Diet.
The prosecutors, however, said testing revealed that the company’s products did not contain any of the Hoodia gordonii herb, “contrary to their labeling information.” Investigators subsequently discovered that product labels did not comply with Prop 65.
Hoodia is found in South Africa and was originally used by bushmen to suppress their appetites when food was scarce or when they went hunting for long periods of time. It is now all the rage in the diet pill world but, like many supplements, has yet to be thoroughly tested.
Irwin Naturals said it could not confirm the task force’s findings about its Hoodia products “because no validated test method exists for identifying Hoodia in the softgel product form used by the company. The company relied instead on the industry standard method of confirming the input of Hoodia, and all manufacturing records confirmed that Hoodia had been put in to the products.”
