The Agency's drug approval and enforcement actions are falling through the cracks, while regulators are squandering time and resources on insubstantial trivia.
adulterated supplements
A new article in the journal Clinical Toxicology reports on prohibited stimulants, found in significant amounts, in several sports and weight-loss supplements. Don’t let the long (and maybe scary) title of the research fool you. It presents sound science and deserves a broader audience than just toxicologists.
Welcome to Bizarro World. While people are wearing gloves for fear of touching a cash register receipt, others are "supplementing" their diet with really nasty drugs that can be bought at any vitamin shop. Dr. Pieter Cohen and colleagues examine yohimbine supplements, and found just about what you'd expect: a bunch of crap.
It didn t take long. Only days after the news broke that an amphetamine-like stimulant called BMPEA was found in a number of dietary supplements, The Vitamin Shoppe, one of the major supplement retailers, announced that it would stop selling all products that contained the chemical.
We at ACSH have been screaming into the wind about the folly of the supplements industry for years. Supplements are nothing but unregulated drugs, and ending this illogical divide between them and prescription drugs is long overdue.
If the FDA finds that a dietary supplement is adulterated with a drug or any potentially harmful contaminant it can issue what is known as a class I recall to protect consumers from such products. According to a recent research letter in JAMA, such products don t necessarily disappear immediately.