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Major Retailers Accused of Selling Fraudulent Herbal Supplements
MikeChino writes: The New York State Attorney General's Office is demanding that GNC, Walmart, Walgreens, and Target remove store brand herbal supplements from their shelves after the pills were found to be packed with a strange array of fraudulent—and in some cases hazardous—ingredients. Popular supplements such as ginseng, valerian root, and St. John's wort sold under store brand names at the four major retailers were found to contain powdered rice, asparagus, and even houseplants, while being completely void of any of the ingredients on the label.
But the Republican/Libertarian said regulation is bad!
Instead of getting "Useless Compound X," buyers were getting "Useless Compound Y."
It is not clear that these substances are useless. Saying herbal medicine works, without evidence, is unscientific. Saying it doesn't work, without evidence, is also unscientific. Many herbs have not been tested for efficacy because they cannot be patented so no one has any vested interest in testing them. Many herbs that have been tested, have turned out to be very effective, and many modern medicines are based on chemicals first found in herbs.
There's a gulf of difference between honest unregulated competition and outright fraud
Yeah, on one side of that gulf we have "reality". Guess which side it's on?
I RTFA and the links and I didn't see any mention of the source manufacturor, but If I had to guess, I would guess they were made under contract in China and labelled with whichever distributor was buying today's production run.
US FDA/USDA-style regulatory enforcement and quality controls are practically non-existant in China. Just look at the great melamine scare a few years ago where they where bumping up the "protein" level of ingrediants by adding toxic melamine (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...).
All imports of food/drug or ingrediants from china should be banned out-right.
Uh, one of the tenets of the Libertarian platform is "No force or fraud." This is certainly fraud, and therefore a suitable target of government force.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No, they don't have to follow suit to compete. The activity described in TFS is already illegal. The bottle just has to contain what they say it contains. I myself take fish oil because I've been told by 3 doctors (general practitioner, nephrologist, and cardiologist) to do exactly that. If it doesn't contain that, then that's fraud, and there are already laws against it. I don't see any need for new ones to make it harder or more expensive for me to continue taking what I already take.
The only "maybe's" I'd consider adding are this:
- No claims on the bottle about the effect of the supplement that haven't already been evaluated by the FDA.
- Make it easier to bring civil action against TV/radio shows or TV/radio show personalities making unsubstantiated health-related claims that aren't even remotely true (make it easier for Dr. Oz's viewers to sue him for the false claims he makes about some of the pills on his show. "Doctor" Bob Martin as well.)
- Make it easier to bring civil action against authors who publish books making unsubstantiated health-related claims (Kevin Trudeau.)
- Make it easier to bring civil action against people who peddle pills via false claims on websites or to the general public via any other means (such as door to door sales, street hustling, etc.)
However I'd never endorse any restriction of what can be sold, and none of what I describe above would do that. Rather, if you make a claim, it either has to be true or it has to be backed up with some kind of peer-reviewed research. (Though it would probably completely obliterate the fields of both naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, which wouldn't bother me in the slightest.)
5) One bad apple does not ruin the batch.
Follow up: yes it does - at least with apples. Ripening apples release ethylene gas that acts like a hormone to activate a specific gene in fruit that causes it to ripen. As it ripens further, the amount of ethylene gas soars and can cause an entire batch of apples stored together to ripen and rot.
Apples can be stored for an extended period if stored in a cold, oxygen-deprived location. Historically, before refrigeration, apples picked were stored for winter in barrels sunk in lakes. Even then, however, one rotten apple could prematurely ripen and rot an entire barrel.
More information here: Postharvest Cooling and Handling of Apples
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
While you are right that there are a lot of studies showing no effect or a negative effect from alt med drugs, there are also peer-reviewed and high-evidence studies showing that some of them do work and are effective.
My wife is a member of ASPEN, and so I get to read through a lot of their journals with her. In a paper on treatments for IBS, the "drug" that had the highest strength of evidence, and effect size was... peppermint oil. The research shows pretty conclusively that it is better than a lot of IBS-specific medicines that have come out in recent years, several of which got pulled from the market for being dangerous, and now can only be prescribed in limited situations.
Peppermint oil will never be a medicine, because you can buy it at the grocery store. But it *is* highly effective at treating a very serious disease.