Friday's Chicago Tribune ran an interesting story on how quality control problems at many dietary supplement manufacturing plants were causing unsafe products that were making people sick.
Interesting, yes, but they completely missed the point.
The article mentioned a few cases, including a factory where a half of a rat found next to a scoop used to fill containers with protein powder. This puzzled me, since I cannot imagine how a half of a rat could possibly climb all the way up a table.
Then there was a case of some imbeciles that poisoned their four-year old with a vitamin "supplement" that contained a little extra selenium--200-times more than it was supposed to contain, and infinity-times the amount of supplemental selenium that should be given to the kid (none).
Yet, this stuff was sold by chiropractors and health stores, probably recommended by a cashier who dropped out of high school. (Of the two, it is not obvious who is less qualified to dispense medical advice.)
The question that the Tribune story should have addressed is why any of this stuff--pure or otherwise--should be sold at all.
But the supplement industry gets away with murder because of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, a masterpiece of greed and ignorance pushed through Congress by Senator Orin Hatch (whose state, Utah is the home to many supplement manufacturers) and two medically ignorant colleagues, Representative Dan Burton (Indiana) and Tom Harkin (Iowa), who are both firmly in the anti-vaccine camp of crazies.
My March 16 op-ed in The American Spectator talks in detail about some of the absurdities of the law and how supplement manufacturers can skirt FDA authority (and common sense) by using certain doublespeak that ostensibly avoids making specific medical claims.
The key to getting away with this is by use of the word "supports."
When you see a label that something "supports prostate health," mentally substitute "this will fix your prostate," and the real intent of the label becomes evident. And worse, good luck finding a label that doesn't say "natural" or "organic" on it. This disingenuously implies that a given product is safe by exploiting consumer ignorance of the fact that neither of these terms have anything to do with safety, but everything to do with marketing.
And worse, the terms "natural" and "organic" also imply that these products are not drugs by virtue of being natural. This is doubly wrong. Not only are supplements drugs, but they are untested drugs--mostly immune from the authority of the FDA, although there have been some recent, but anemic attempts to get a handle on this.
I could go on for days about the garbage that is being legally sold in health stores. Some of these products include anabolic steroids, amphetamine-like stimulants and toxic metals (silver, in particular). These are supplements? What exactly are they supplementing? An amphetamine deficiency?
The term "herbal" is an especially powerful magic word that unlocks the vault of ignorance (and money). But this is just more nonsense. My 2005 op-ed on the American Council of Science and Health web site debunks the science-fictional aura surrounding the word. For now, suffice it to say that Poison Ivy is actually an herb.
It is surprising that a prestigious newspaper like the Chicago Tribune could take an important issue and turn it into a story that actually promotes ignorance by implying that by simply getting a few rat heads out of a supplement makes it OK to take.
It is not. Purer garbage is still pure garbage.