Better Supplement Controls No Great Loss
The public response to the recent ephedra ban (which is also this subject of this month’s Public Policy article) puzzles me to no end. Reminiscent of the Today sponge episode of Seinfield, people have responded to the FDA’s banning of the potentially dangerous supplement by hoarding the stuff.
ABC News reports that health food stores were cleaned out of products containing the supplement within hours of the announcement of the impending ban. Though GNC, the nation’s largest retailer of supplements, stopped selling products that contain ephedra in June 2003, there are still hundreds of thousands of pharmacies, health food stores and gyms who are more than willing to sell Metabolife, Speed Stack, Ripped Force, and others, by the case, if necessary.
Longtime users credit ephedra supplements with helping them to stay in shape, fight fatigue, perform better in sports, and, of course, lose weight. More than anything else, ephedra supplements are marketed as weight-loss aids. On its web site Metabolife International claims its Metabolife 356, one of the most popular ephedra products on the market, increases the body’s metabolism so users burn fat faster. A well placed asterisk warns the reader that these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA and that the products is not intended to cure, prevent, treat, or diagnose disease. It’s a catchall disclaimer that supplement manufacturers use to remind users which side of the DSHEA Act of 1994 they are on.
Ironically, it’s the same argument that most ephedra users use, somewhat naively – that ephedra is not a drug, because the active ingredient is plant-based. The unspoken conclusion being that “it must be safe.” Ephreda, in its plant form, has been used in Asia for centuries to treat a variety of ailments. It has gained popularity in the U.S. as a weight loss supplement as more people look for ways to fight the classic American battle-of the bulge. In supplements, ephedra is often mixed or “stacked’ with caffeine and aspirin to increase its stimulant-like effects. This mixture can act very much like amphetamines, causing dangerous, if not deadly, results to in the body.
Ephedra users argue that the thousands of adverse action cases gathered by the FDA are from people who were abusing the supplement or who were in poor health before they began taking it. They say that when used properly, ephedra is as close to a magic pill as they can find – a pill that allows finally helps them to lose the weight and have the bodies they want. While I can certainly agree that a pill that promises to help keep unwanted pounds off is very tempting, I can’t ignore the fact that ephedra’s side effects seem to be worse for the body than carrying around a few extra pounds.
For its part, the FDA argues that overwhelming evidence suggests that most people who have had problems with the supplement were taking the manufacturers’ recommended dosages (which by the way, vary widely from brand to brand). Moreover, health professionals opposed to the use of ephedra say that the dangerous side effects – increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, etc. – can affect people with no history of heart or circulatory problems. How is someone supposed to know if they will be affected or not? The short answer, they won’t know, perhaps until it is too late.
The ephedra users who are racing the March deadline, hoarding cases of the supplement and looking to Canada as a possible source, see the FDA as an uptight bureaucracy, close-minded when it comes to “alternative medicine.” Generally I’d be first in line to agree with the uptight and bureaucracy parts of that statement, and to some degree I can see that the FDA does tend to be biased against herbal and other alternative treatments in favor of manufactured drugs. I can also appreciate the degree to which people favor “natural” remedies and foods. As an avid user of organic meats and food products, vitamin supplements, and the like, once might assume that I’d be on the side of the supplement industry and ephedra users on this one. That’s not the case. For one thing, I think that too often people mistake “all natural” with “healthy.” The fact is, the words “all natural” have virtually no meaning in product marketing. They give no guarantees of safety or efficacy. Just because something is not man-made, does not mean it cannot hurt you.
Secondly, because of the gaps in supplement regulation, it is impossible to trust what manufacturers put on a bottle as a safe dosage. If the makers of Metabolife want you to buy more $35 bottles of their ephedra supplement, they can simply up the dosage recommendations and there’s no government agency to stop them. That lack of regulation coupled with the idiotic human tendency to assume that “if a little is good, more must be better” makes ephedra and its botanical cousins far from a safe bet.
But for the millions of people enamored with the promises of easy weight loss and limitless energy, it’s a bet they are more than willing to make.
