Are Supplements Safe?
One area of concern for many consumers who are either using supplements or thinking of doing so is the question of safety.
How safe are supplements in general terms?
One specific area of concern is that the companies that produce supplements are still essentially unregulated, and thus the quality of the products that they produce can vary dramatically.
In the USA, for example, the Food and Drug Administration regulates dietary supplements as foods, and not as drugs.
Thus it is that, unlike pharmaceutical ‘drug’ companies, supplement manufacturers do not have to prove either the safety or effectiveness of their products.
The FDA can only take action after a dietary supplement has been proven harmful, and the purity and quality of individual brands of dietary supplements are essentially controlled by the companies that make them.
Whilst this may at first glance seem a little worrying, nevertheless, it is seen by most people as a good thing that supplements are not treated as drugs and regulated by increasingly ‘Big Brother’ Governments that many folks intrinsically distrust.
If they were centrally controlled, so the arguments go, then it would become necessary to obtain prescriptions to get them, and therefore competition in the markets would fall away significantly, thus leading to the prices of supplements inevitably skyrocketing.
Nevertheless, you do have the right to expect the highest levels of quality and safety from your nutritional products, just as you would expect the same from (regulated) pharmaceutical drug products.
Just to bring some perspective to the picture, one of the main reasons that supplements are not generally regulated is that they are seen as being intrinsically less harmful than drugs.
For example, a 1998 study reported (again) in JAMA, showed that in one year (1994) over 2.2 million patients experienced serious reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.
Indeed, that same year, an estimated 106,000 patients actually died from what is somewhat strangely described as the ‘appropriate’ use of pharmaceuticals (it was hardly appropriate if it killed them!).
Nevertheless, death caused by an adverse reaction to drugs is, in fact, one of the leading causes of mortality in the USA.
Conversely, data on mortality from nutritional supplements, compiled from 1987 to 1994 by the U.S. Poison Control Centers, recorded only five deaths.
So, even accepting that there are over 1000 different ‘across-the-counter’ supplemental products available in the USA and Canada, the standards of safety are still remarkably high.
Used in any sensible amounts, there seems little in the available facts to cast doubt on the view of a leading expert that supplements are ‘about as toxic as apple pie’!
Certainly, the contrast between the safety of prescribed drugs and supplements could not be much more clearly marked.
Again this might make you question why it is that people seem happier to get sick and then visit the Doctor, rather than just making sure that they did not get sick in the first place?