Every supplement company has a different standard for manufacturing, which means you should try to understand the nuances of how supplements are made. Your health may depend upon it.
The government only gives minimal guidelines on how supplements are stored and coated. So, you need to do most of your own homework.
What’s in Your Supplement?
When manufacturers chelate, or coat, a supplement, they are making it more resistant to damage during digestion. Manufacturers use binders, usually vegetable gums, cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose to hold the tablets together. Capsules can also use binders to help affect the speed of a product being released into the bloodstream.
Are you one of the 14 million Americans who takes dietary supplements? If you are taking supplements to help you lose weight, please do your homework first. According to this story in the New England Journal of Medicine, you may be getting way more than you paid for.
“A police offer who had been encouraged by his doctor decided to try a weight-loss supplement to help him shed his extra pounds. But instead of losing weight, he lost his job. His diet pills, which were imported from Brazil and sold in the United States, contained vitamin E, centella, senna, and cascara, among other “natural” ingredients. Not included on the label was the amphetamine detected in his urine drug screen. The now-unemployed sergeant is not alone. Such contaminated supplements represent an emerging risk to public health.”
The bottom line is you really have to be careful with what you trust as “safe.” In August 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found more than 140 supplements that contained undeclared active pharmaceutical ingredients. DRUGS! These represent only a fraction of the contaminated supplements on the market.
Following the death of a 19-year-old male and 23 reports of liver damage, the FDA has stepped in to warn consumers to discontinue use of the popular diet pill Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut manufacturer Iovate Health Sciences has agreed to recall 14 products from the market as “an abundance of caution.”
From the FDA press release — The FDA has received 23 reports of serious health problems ranging from jaundice and elevated liver enzymes, an indicator of potential liver injury, to liver damage requiring liver transplant. One death due to liver failure has been reported to the FDA. Other health problems reported include seizures; cardiovascular disorders; and rhabdomyolysis, a type of muscle damage that can lead to other serious health problems such as kidney failure.
This past week, the federal Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report that requests the FDA to exert more oversight power in the review and evaluation of the diet supplement industry. The report says that while the FDA has increased their watch of the diet pill market, they have not done enough to ensure the safety of consumers who experiment with weight loss and other non-medical diet products. According to the New York Times, Americans spent an estimated $25 billion on weight loss and diet products last year.
In 2008, the FDA received 948 reports of health problems associated with dietary supplements, including 9 deaths and 234 hospitalizations. And the FDA asserts that these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. The regulatory body estimates that each year, over 50,000 health problems are connected to the use of diet supplements.
We are truly living in an era of mind-boggling technological innovations. When it comes to food, science is creating some pretty wild stuff that is making genetically-modified tomatoes look like cell phones from the early nineties.
One of the latest class of products that are designed to help us lose weight are tasteless food additives that are sprinkled on food. Once ingested, they have the power to induce feelings of fullness by acting on certain areas of the brain. It’s kind of like what may happen if hoodia were to meet your salt shaker. But unlike many dietary supplements, these food additives don’t contain hoodia, drugs or any other stimulants.
One such product is Sensa.
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