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DoJ Going After Makers of Dietary Supplement (reuters.com)
schwit1 writes: Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, have announced criminal and civil actions related to unlawful advertising and sale of dietary supplements. "Six executives with USPlabs LLC and a related company, S.K. Laboratories, face criminal charges related to the sale of unlawful dietary supplements. Four were arrested on Tuesday and two are expected to surrender, the Justice department said. The indictment says that USPlabs used a synthetic stimulant manufactured in China to make Jack3d and OxyElite Pro but told retailers that the supplements were made from plant extracts." The FTC is working on this as well, and their press release has more details. The DoJ's case involves "more than 100 makers and marketers" of these supplements. It's about time.
You can lie all you want about what the ingredients do, but you can't get away with lying about what they are.
The reason this "supplement" law got passed was reaction to total stupidity in the other direction -- the FDA was trying to assert power to require a prescription for vitamins.
I kind of like Jerry Pournelle's proposal -- it should be perfectly legal to sell snake oil, as long as the bottle accurately describes the ingredients, and contains actual oil from actual snakes. And, under the Pournelle Rule, these bozos would be perfectly open to prosecution, since they didn't put whatever weird organic compounds some quack in China whomped up on their label.
I absolutely do not want the FDA preventing me from getting vitamin D pills with more than 400 units of D.
Uh, no. The claim is anybody was trying to force consumers to get a prescription to purchase supplements is bogus. http://www.snopes.com/politics...
This re-created the snake oil industry that the FDA had killed, with but minor regulations preventing extreme claims - and also made it difficult for the FDA to prosecute if the company did make those claims.
Hatch and Harkin killed more Americans than most Senators, and helped enrich a whole generation of scamsters.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I was an amateur boxer for a few years with no notable accomplishments. One thing I did notice was that supplement companies are COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT. There is a particularly eye-opening documentary about steroids called "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" where the director creates his own supplement using unknown ingredients and gives it an obscene markup, and they don't even have to list their ingredients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The supplement industry as a whole is typically that way. And while TFS states "It's about time", I'm not so sure.
People who buy this shit seem like they WANT to get ripped off. If you try to explain to them scientifically why the claims don't make sense, they'll respond with some spiel about how how it makes them feel so much better, how they never get sick anymore (I roll my eyes when I hear people make the later claim, especially when they claim shit like vegetarian diets make them never sick anymore) when in reality it's a combination of placebo and confirmation bias.
And then there's claims from people who hear about MSG, HFCS, or Aspartame, and then from that point onward claim that one or all makes them sick or feel bad, even though it's scientifically proven that these same people don't actually develop any symptoms so long as they aren't consciously aware that what they eat actually has any of it, just like that electromagnetic hypersensitivity bullshit.
This all is really just the modern incarnation of prayer as a cure, and overpriced shit from Whole Foods (which sells a lot of junk food) is the modern equivalent of buying indulgences.
(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock
Honestly the whole opposition to antibiotics in livestock is inhumane. A lot of morons out there perpetuate the myth that antibiotics are given to healthy animals (they aren't unless the herd has been infected and they need to inoculate to prevent spread of disease) and that antibiotics in livestock make it to your plate (they don't.) Likewise, they also don't contribute to multi-drug resistant bugs; that's actually caused almost entirely by overly sterile hospital environments, and those bugs ORIGINATE in human hospitals, NOT from cattle farms.
Meanwhile companies like Chipotle are pressuring suppliers to stop using antibiotics because of popular customer demand. So instead they buy from slaughterhouses that, when an animal gets sick, it either gets no treatment at all, or very inadequate treatment, and is allowed to suffer and die. Because, you know, antibiotics in livestock is bad, even though there's no scientific basis for that statement. In fact the whole thing started because some alarmist blogger noted that 80% of antibiotics made are sold to cattle farms, ignoring completely that the animals that require them are much larger and therefore need a MUCH BIGGER dose to have the same effect.
Did anyone die? The answer to that is a resounding...maybe. There's no question that the active ingredient, DMAA (dimethylamylamine), is a fairly powerful stimulant. It also constricts blood vessels, thereby increasing blood pressure. Any stimulant with cardiovascular effects has the potential for adverse effects, including heart attack or stroke. In the most recent info I found with a cursory Google search, the FDA says it has received numerous reports of adverse effects, and at least five deaths which occurred with users of DMAA products. This is not proof of causation, but because it's a plausible mechanism it bears close scrutiny.