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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.
What's the big deal? Instead of getting "Useless Compound X," buyers were getting "Useless Compound Y."
Note: Yes, I'm partially kidding. People are entitled to get the woo they've been promised, and I suppose there are allergy issues involved.
But of course it's perfectly ok to sell fraudule...err, homeopathic "remedies" which do not and cannot work any different than a placebo.
This is what an unregulated market looks like. Human nature, no matter how well intended 99.99999% of the participants may be, one bad apple will put greed over doing whats right. And then, in order to compete, the rest have to start following suit.
500 mg or more of Cinnamon helps insulin sensitivity- close to what the diabetic drug Metformin does. However, a number of cinnamon pills are bogus- sawdust and cinnamon oil often times.
500 mg -1000mg of Niacin (nicotinic acid) raises HDL (even more effective when combined with large doses of fish oil).
Some supplements do work. It is bad enough to try and figure out which supplement contains the right form of Niacin, compared to figuring out if the supplement even contains the ingredients on the label.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
supplement company: check out our new herbal animal vegetable raw vegan youth potion penis elixer and life enhancer with guanaramalama and bilinko for supported function of your satrogenum B9
AG: this is nothing but brake dust, old chinese newspaper shreds, and windshield glass
supplement company: well its been on the market for 2 years and is completely safe.
AG: yeah but it doesnt do what it says and contains things it doesnt list. pull it.
supplement company: sure thing buddy! let me just step over this large mountain of cash I earned and ill get right to it. sure am sorry about the mixup.
Stores: oh we sure are super sorry too, turns out we got distracted by counting all this money.
Supplement company: who wants to sell this new supplement! its got enhanced vigorators and revitalomic green tea tomato lyzopramic dyloricackles to enhance your penis life
Stores: who are we do deny the customer!
AG: THIS IS JUST SHREDDED PHONEBOOKS AND CAFFEINE
supplement company: it iiiiiis? oh my worrrrd it happened again! goodness gracious.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I can't decide whether this says more about corporate greed or about the culture of alternative medicine, that these retailers can make such a flagrant mockery of herbal supplements, and apparently get away with it for quite a while.
Over-regulation is bad. Selling a bottle that is 100% not what it says on the label, is a reasonable expectation. Call it what you want - false advertising, fraud, etc. It's clearly something that shouldn't be permitted. I don't think you'd get much argument from either side of the isle.
Er, aisle.
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?
1) It is a regulated market
2) They violated the truth in advertising laws
3) The company is now open to untold lawsuits because some of the contents were harmful.
4) Fraudulent activity is not indicative of an unregulated or free market. Just as theft, breaking and entering, and mugging people are not business plans.
5) One bad apple does not ruin the batch. Simple proof, I have seen three people I went to High School with arrested on COP's. That does not make everyone in our class criminals!
6) Your low opinion of Human Nature does not appear correct. In test after test people in general are honest.
But the Republican/Libertarian said regulation is bad!
Nope...That's NOT what they say.
The ones I hear talking about this say that government and regulation should be as SMALL as possible; that OVER REGULATION and large government is bad.
There is a MAJOR difference between what they actually say and what you claim they say.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I was curious about point #1, so I looked up what the FDA has to say about regulating supplements:
Manufacturers and distributors of dietary supplements and dietary ingredients are prohibited from marketing products that are adulterated or misbranded. That means that these firms are responsible for evaluating the safety and labeling of their products before marketing to ensure that they meet all the requirements of DSHEA and FDA regulations. FDA is responsible for taking action against any adulterated or misbranded dietary supplement product after it reaches the market.
Source: http://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/.
It would appear to me that this is not just a New York State Law issue, but also a violation of Federal laws.
If some idiot wants to buy 20C whatever that's their business. It's only a problem if the what is in the bottle is actually something different or false claims are made about efficacy.
Homeopathic "remedies" are the very definition of false claims regarding efficacy.
I think the main point of his comment is that the products being sold, even legitimately, have not been proven to have any actual effect on the human body. The whole dietary supplement industry is built on "this might help you" type lies.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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
So you're going to call misrepresenting your product as a legitimate unregulated market?
By what standard does someone judge an unregulated concept to be legitimate? Assuming such judgment has teeth, doesn't that standard become a form of regulation?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You are confused, there are already regulations and they were broken in this case. The solution is there already in existing 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.)
The ACTUAL problem, is that active compound content of herbs is HIGHLY variable.
One valarian rout of equal mass to another valarian root, will contain more (Or less) active compound than the other.
This means to have consisten product, EXTENSIVE, and CONTINUOUS product testing would have to be done to assure correct dosage for the proper treatment of a condition.
That's expensive, and creates liability for when the preparation does not meet the listed dosage of active compound.
It isn't that the compounds in the herbs are not effective-- it is that the efficacy of a certain measurement of herbal preparation cannot be consistently effective.
Synthetic preparations (Like a tylenol), are created under lab conditions. The quantity of active ingredient is tightly controlled, and dosage is easily metered. There are fewer ancilliary compounds in the preparation that can cause upset, and overall the preparations are safer, more reliable, and more potent.
Doesn't matter. If it says "parsley", which does nothing, then the rule is it's supposed to be parsley and nothing but parsley.
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. . . .
I think the main point of the GP is that the end consumer has no means to test exactly what they are buying. Whether or not the real ingredients do anything, is at best, subject. Whether or not the product contains what the label says, is not subjective.
"people in general are honest" .. I think those tests probably did not include lawyers, advertisers, salesmen, corporate CEOs, etc.
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.
6) Your low opinion of Human Nature does not appear correct. In test after test people in general are honest.
But the dishonest people are the ones that rise to positions of power.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
that these firms are responsible for evaluating the safety and labeling of their products
In their defense, the companies confirmed that the labels were perfectly safe, and said exactly what they intended to say.
The irrational prejudice against GMO products is like the irrational prejudice against farmed fish. People preferentially buy fish labeled "Wild Caught" because it sounds better, without any thought to the fact that they are contributing to a known environmental problem, depletion of wild fish stocks. For the health of the oceans, I would like to see this label eliminated.
I have a friend who worked for the FDA. She told me that she never takes herbal supplements as pills, but only as tea. The tea is classified as a food, and therefore has to be labeled properly.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes