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Numerous recent studies have undercut the purported benefits of various herbal supplements.
Gingko, echinacea and
Saint John's wort, have all been found relatively ineffective against many of the ills they have been claimed to help
This does not seem to have slowed purchases by U.S. consumers, who spent $14.8 billion on these and other natural supplements in 2007, according to
a report released last summer.
It also hasn't stopped many supplement sellers from making the false claims and even recommending potentially dangerous uses of the products to customers, according to
a recent investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). To obtain a sample of sales practices, the agency got staff members to call online retailers and to pose undercover as elderly customers at stores selling supplements.
Customers were not only told that supplements were capable of results for which there is no scientific evidence (such as preventing or curing
Alzheimer's disease); the advice and information also was potentially harmful (including a recommendation to replace prescription medicine with garlic). Excerpts from secretly recorded conversations are available on
the GAO's Web site.
Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found the practices "improper and likely in violation of statutes and regulations," according to the report, which was delivered as testimony on May 26 by Gregory Kutz, managing director of Forensic Audits and Special Investigations at the GAO, to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging.
But the potential for harm did not appear to end with marketing and staff recommendations. Following up on previous studies that had found contaminants and other adulterants in herbal supplements—which are regulated by the FDA as food products, not drugs, and thus not subject to pre-market approval or testing—the GAO sent bottles of 40 commonly purchased supplements to a lab for testing.
The lab found 92 percent of the tested herbal supplements (which included pills, capsules and other products derived from plant products but not
vitamins) contained trace amounts of lead and 80 percent had at least one other contaminant, such as mercury, cadmium and/or arsenic. The levels (none were more than 0.05 part per million) did not exceed what the FDA and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently considers hazardous, but, notes
Marcus Reidenberg, chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, "ingesting these heavy metals is of no benefit." And the GAO report states that "consuming high levels of the contaminants for which we tested…can lead to severe health consequences, such as increased risk of
cancer."