Problems with nutritional supplements
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By David Annis
Article ID: 1239
Walk into any supermarket, drug store, or health food store and you will find a wide variety of nutritional supplements. People use these as an alternative to “western” or “conventional” medicine. Unfortunately, when taking nutritional supplements, you aren’t treating your disease or keeping yourself healthy. You are using yourself as a human guinea pig in a poorly designed experiment, the results of which will be thrown away.
There are two kinds of assumptions, those which can be proven to be true by experiment and those that are inherently not provable. One can argue that God’s existence is not provable, and so we should just accept his existence on faith (an argument I disagree with. For more detail see the article If you can’t prove God doesn’t exist, why not believe?). However, the claim that a particular plant product can cure cancer is testable. We can give the product to some people with cancer and give others an alternative treatment or a placebo. We can see, objectively, whether the product works. While no process is perfect, a drug needs to be shown to be safe and effective in a well controlled series of trials (usually double-blind placebo-controlled) to be approved by the FDA. Nutritional supplements are rarely if ever tested in this manner.
Since a nutritional supplement’s active ingredients and its formulations haven’t been tested, you are using yourself as a guinea pig, though nobody is monitoring the result of that particular experiment. However, that’s only the beginning. Unlike drugs, the FDA does not monitor or regulate the composition of nutritional supplements. So, even if a nutritional supplement had been previously tested, the producer can reformulate the product at any time without testing, product safety constraints or warning.
The biggest concern is that of the unregulated nature of the supplement market. There is no guarantee that what the label says about those pills is actually what’s inside those pills. Nor are there guarantees about ingredients or impurities not listed on the label.
Unfortunately, these concerns are not theoretical. When independently tested, nutritional supplements are often found to be contaminated or not to contain the correct amount of the active ingredient. In some cases, they contain none of the active ingredient. For example, a recent independent test of ten red yeast rice supplements by consumerlab.com found that “levels of cholesterol-lowering statin compounds vary by more than one-hundred-fold across products – with some containing large amounts but others having hardly any”. When testing twenty-three iron supplements they found “a potential toxin, citrinin, was found in four of the products.” They also found that “one ‘high potency’ iron supplement contained only 37% of its claimed iron. A second supplement was contaminated with lead.” Even within a brand the level of the active ingredient often fluctuates wildly from batch to batch.
If you are taking a nutritional supplement to try to treat or manage a disease, you are taking something that could have been tested rigorously but probably wasn’t. If it was tested, it probably wasn’t in the formulation that you’re getting. If it was tested using the formulation that you are taking, there is nothing stopping the manufacturer from reformulating it. The product may contain more or less of the active ingredient than indicated on the label. It may be contaminated with toxins. Nobody is systematically monitoring the effect of the supplement on you or on any other guinea pig. Is it worth taking a pill with unknown contents that may or may not work better than a placebo?
Remember what you’re gambling with: your health.
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