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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.
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.
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.