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Is The Nutritional Supplement Industry Feeding You Bull Balls For Breakfast?

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My patient had been feeling unusually irritable lately.  Nothing had changed in his home or work life to bring on such a shift in mood.  He wasn’t taking any medicines that could cause such symptoms either, being a strappingly healthy young guy.  A weightlifter in fact.  “Are you taking any kind of steroids?,” I asked him non-judgmentally.  I knew that such chemicals could affect mood.

“Nope.  Wouldn’t touch the stuff.  Just some nutritional supplements,” he told me.

I asked him to bring the supplements in at his next appointment.  When he did that, I discovered that one of the supplements listed “ground bull testes” as an ingredient.  My patient was unwittingly ingesting testosterone.  How much?  Impossible to know.  The label was as vague as middle school prose.

The nutritional supplement industry is astonishingly under regulated.  A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the absurdity of this regulatory gap, pointing out the large number of pharmacologically active substances in supplements:

More than 500 supplements have already been found to be adulterated with pharmaceuticals or pharmaceutical analogues, including new stimulants, novel anabolic steroids, unapproved antidepressants, banned weight-loss medications, and untested sildenafil [Viagra] analogues.

The authors even discovered a new analogue of methamphetamine in a popular sports supplement.  In fact, many substances used in supplements are known to cause serious health problems, as they summarize in an excellent table:

Government regulations are normally thought of as an impediment to efficient markets.  But in the case of the dietary supplement industry, the market fails at its most basic function—of maximizing consumers’ best interests by giving them wide latitude to choose among products according to their own preferences.  In the case of nutritional supplements, consumer choices often fail to maximize people’s best interests, because consumers do not realize what they are consuming.  Moreover, consumers often believe that the products they purchase have been demonstrated to be safe—how else could they be available at the GNC store in their friendly suburban mall?

The FDA regulates pharmaceutical products for a reason—because those products can have powerful, unintended effects on people’s bodies.  Time to more thoroughly regulate the nutritional supplement industry.

Allowing people to unwittingly consume pharmacologically dangerous products?  That’s a bunch of bull.