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>brands that clearly aren't safe tend to disappear pretty quickly from store shelves. (Because poisoning your customer is bad for business.) Obviously not. >

by aestra 12y ago

>brands that clearly aren't safe tend to disappear pretty quickly from store shelves. (Because poisoning your customer is bad for business.) Obviously not. > Almost a decade ago, experts were talking about how these supplements often contained “just a fraction of the ingredient on their labels–if any at all,” along with pesticide and heavy metal contamination. Just this year, news emerged that dietary supplements are tops in drug recalls for containing ingredients that pose a risk of “severe adverse health consequences or death.” Plus only 2 companies from the study had 100% authentic ingredients. Pretty sure there are still more than two supplement companies still around. Plus all the weight loss and body building supplements that contain drugs keep coming out and it doesn't effect sales of other products. And anyways it is playing a game of whack a mole. Plus you have a complete and total misunderstand about how supplement research is carried out.

glenra 12y ago
I'm distinguishing "unsafe" from "doesn't work". Having "just a fraction of the ingredient on the labels", even if true, doesn't automatically make a product "clearly not safe". The study referenced in the Forbes article doesn't say how it picked which 44 products to study, which seems to be key to the question at hand. Was it a random sample? Was it a sample they had prior reason to suspect? Only if they'd picked products from the shelves of a specific retailer would it be a test of a retailer's selection acumen. (The fact that a product is available from somebody somewhere doesn't mean you're likely to encounter it.) They also don't tell us which specific products were good or had problems so there's no way for a 3rd party to check their results. (Was that the intent? Given 2 companies were absolutely reliable, why not at least tell us which 2 companies they were?) Dietary supplements often get recalled despite being ridiculously safe. If the FDA gets more than a certain number of adverse reports they have no incentive to consider how popular the product is and do a cost-benefit analysis; as far as they're concerned the "benefit" of a popular product counts as zero so any measurable risk is too high. Weight loss supplements are particularly prone to being recalled due to risk levels that aren't at all out of line with the potential benefit.

by aestra 12y ago

glenra 12y ago

I'm distinguishing "unsafe" from "doesn't work". Having "just a fraction of the ingredient on the labels", even if true, doesn't automatically make a product "clearly not safe". The study referenced in the Forbes article doesn't say how it picked which 44 products to study, which seems to be key to the question at hand. Was it a random sample? Was it a sample they had prior reason to suspect? Only if they'd picked products from the shelves of a specific retailer would it be a test of a retailer's selection acumen. (The fact that a product is available from somebody somewhere doesn't mean you're likely to encounter it.) They also don't tell us which specific products were good or had problems so there's no way for a 3rd party to check their results. (Was that the intent? Given 2 companies were absolutely reliable, why not at least tell us which 2 companies they were?) Dietary supplements often get recalled despite being ridiculously safe. If the FDA gets more than a certain number of adverse reports they have no incentive to consider how popular the product is and do a cost-benefit analysis; as far as they're concerned the "benefit" of a popular product counts as zero so any measurable risk is too high. Weight loss supplements are particularly prone to being recalled due to risk levels that aren't at all out of line with the potential benefit.