If the ingredients in your pills don’t really work, does it matter if they’re correct?
Well, yes.
Even if that echinacea pill doesn’t cure the common cold, if a supplement manufacturer sells you an echinacea pill, they have to put echinacea in it.
Supplement makers can and do make all kinds of claims about the health benefits of the stuff they’re selling you.
They claim that supplements can “boost your immune system,” relieve aches and pains, improve memory, and promote “wellness,” whatever the heck that means.
Most this is nonsense, but thanks to the manufacturers’ special friend in the U.S. Senate, Senator Orrin Hatch, the federal government has almost no power to regulate these claims.
Over the years, the supplement companies have been very generous to Senator Hatch, and he has returned the favor by defending them (though of course he denies any quid pro quo).
Even supplement makers have limits: they can’t sell you ground-up house plants, or rice powder, claiming that it’s St. Johns Wort.
But as New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman revealed last week, that’s exactly what some of them have been doing.
Amazingly, 79% of the supplements tested did not contain the primary ingredient listed on the label. Many of them contained other plant material, including plants that might cause an allergic reaction in unsuspecting customers. [*Update 17 Feb: GNC has responded to the AG; see the bottom of this article for more.]
You see, as cheap as most supplements are (compared to real medicine, that is), rice powder is even cheaper.
Attorney General Schneiderman sent letters to four of the largest retailers of supplements in the country: Walmart, Walgreens, GNC, and Target, demanding them to immediately stop selling supplements that were falsely labelled, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s Wort, ginkgo biloba, and others.
What did Schneiderman’s office do?
Well, they conducted a scientific study, using DNA sequencing to test the ingredients in six types of herbal supplements, looking at different brands from multiple stores.
They tested each sample five times to ensure accuracy.
They collected 78 different samples and ran 390 tests in all.
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