Dietary supplements laced with illegal and potentially hazardous ingredients are being imported into this country in vast amounts.
As The New York Times reports, the tainted influx includes everything from weight loss supplements to pills touted to provide the sexual benefits of Viagra at far lower prices.
“It’s a remarkable tidal wave of products,” said Michael Levy, who heads the office of drug security, integrity and recalls for the Food and Drug Administration. Levy said federal authorities intercept “only a fraction” of the tainted dietary supplements shipped to this country.
The worrisome supplements that get through include Pai You Guo, which is marketed as a natural weight-loss supplement from China — but has tested positive in the past for containing two hazardous drugs, including a suspected carcinogen.
“My patients are being harmed by this,” Dr. Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School told the Times. He listed kidney failure, heart problems, depression and addiction among the maladies that he has seen from tainted dietary supplements sold openly on the Internet and in shops nationwide.
The makers of legal dietary supplements — the kind found at chain stories such as GNC, for example — acknowledge they are reluctant to raise too many alarms. Even though there is little evidence that many dietary supplements provide real health benefits, legal supplements, from multivitamins to ginkgo biloba, are a big and growing business. Americans spent $28.1 billion on them last year, up from $21.3 billion five years ago, according to estimates from Nutrition Business Journal.
Many millions more are spent annually on black-market products, such as those marketed for weight loss, bodybuilding and sexual enhancement. Some of these products, according to the FDA, contain drugs such as amphetamines and synthetic steroids.
Industry representatives say the vast majority of supplements are safe, and they fault regulators for failing to stop the influx of illegal products from places like China. Few seem willing to tackle the problem openly.
“We walk a fine line,” says Steve Mister, president of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group in Washington that represents supplement manufacturers and ingredient suppliers. “We want to protect consumers, but we also don’t want to alarm consumers so they stay away from the whole marketplace.”
Mister says legitimate manufacturers ensure product safety. Under federal law, supplements are defined as products that contain only supplemental dietary ingredients, such as vitamins and minterals. People who knowingly make or distribute products spiked with drugs, he says, are rare.
However, major chains including GNC and the Vitamin Shoppe withdrew a weight-loss product called StarCaps from their stores three years ago after reports surfaced that the product, marketed as a papaya-based supplement, contained a powerful diuretic drug.
Keeping tainted dietary supplements out of the marketplace is complicated by the fact that supplement makers in the U.S., unlike pharmaceutial companies, don’t have to prove their products are safe and effective before they start selling them.
Related Post:
Dietary Supplement Makers Warned to Stop Selling Tainted Products
Your article is good but the title implies that federal regulators are to blame when nothing could be farther from the truth. The blame lays with the elected officials who passed DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, and the billion dollar alt. med./supplement industry that lobbied hard for it and aggressively lobbies against any proposed legislation that will protect consumers from fraud as well as useless and dangerous supplements.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/10/FDCQ1788VE.DTL
The supplement industry is as bad as the tobacco industry. While screaming publicly that it wants regulators to eliminate dangerous products, behind the scenes groups like CRN work hard to make sure that they don’t touch products that are totally useless and have harmed many like silver dietary supplements.
Rosemary Jacobs
http://rosemaryjacobs.com/naturopaths.html
http://rosemaryjacobs.com
http://www.webanstrich.de/rosemary/
http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com