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"Seeing the USP Verified Mark on a label indicates that the dietary supplement product inside
Contains the ingredients listed on the label, in the declared potency and amounts.
Does not contain harmful levels of specified contaminants.
Will break down and release into the body within a specified amount of time.
Has been made according to FDA current Good Manufacturing Practices using sanitary and well-controlled procedures."
"CONCLUSIONS: With the possible exceptions of Vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids there is no data to support the widespread use of dietary supplements in Westernized populations; indeed, many of these supplements may be harmful."
Most people who eat a diet that includes meat, vegetables, and fruit will get enough of both macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). If you start removing a major food group from your diet, such as meat, it will be more difficult to get all you need. In that case, supplementing vitamins, such as B12, may be a good idea. Anyone who is on a weight loss diet may want to consider a vitamin and mineral supplement. It is not necessary to use expensive health store vitamins and take each vitamin and mineral separately.
If your overall diet is poor, you are wasting money by using supplements. Improve your diet first.
There is no convincing evidence that there is benefit in taking more than the recommended amounts of vitamins and minerals is helpful to the average healthy person. Consult your doctor before taking large amounts of any vitamin or mineral, such as niacin.
When you eat meat you are eating DEAD ANIMALS. All the life force has long since left the animal. The most healthful foods you can eat are living: picked freshly from your garden or purchased at a local farmers' market. A tablespoon of broccoli sprouts has more nutrients than two huge heads of broccoli. Also fermented foods are good. The myth that protein is so necessary has been blown way out of proportion. Vegetables have protein in them and nuts and seeds have even more. People aren't going to wither away if they don't eat their quotient of dead animals. In fact they could very well turn back the aging clock. Some raw foodists I've seen look 25 years younger than their age.
Go on YouTube and look up "Lou Corona" who is in his early sixties and looks about 35. There is also a couple 70 plus year old ladies who could pass for mid or late 40s and there are several near 40 ish people who look around 20.
I think it's worth mentioning here the manner of testing and experimenting with drugs has to change. Thalidomide tested just fine on rabbits, that was the primary problem. The ridiculous dosages they give to rats to see how much of the product causes 50% of the sample to die (LD-50 test) - how is that supposed to relate to humans?
We put dogs in tiny chambers, pump smoke in there, and relate the result to how 2nd hand smoke effects humans?
We can do better. I don't want the products I buy to be tested on tortured animals, I want clinical evidence that this product works on humans.
SuzyQ, you sure learned a lot about general medicine from having a son with leukemia, amazing. You should apply for a license, you probably know more than the average practicing doctor, or at least you think you do.
"One-third of adverse events from supplement use were considered moderately severe or worse, including symptoms such as heart attack, seizures, coma, liver failure and death."
Adverse drug reactions are indeed important. The question is really how many are preventable. Does that 100K per year include seriously ill people who would have died anyway without the drug, for example?
The problem is that our medical system is, by and large, ignorant of alternative healing, unlike doctors in, say, Germany. All they can pedal is drugs made by huge economic enterprises. If the system were really involved in maintaining and restoring health, it would test alternates and train doctors in how to use them. Most people would always opt for solving our health problems in the safest and least expensive way before escalating to things with potentially more dangerous side effects.
Because the medical profession is unknowing and some are even uncaring about alternative medicine people are forced into the position of researching these things themselves and self treating. The solution is not banning the alternates. The solution is educating the professionals in how to use them.
If a doctor ever recommended a drug for me or mine with bad side effects like the cholesterol lowering drugs and I had money and time, I would take up residence in Germany for a few months for treatment there.
According to you, an eminent professional authority, without a doubt everybody who purchases and uses these substances is being hoodwinked by snake oil salesmen.
We'll just choose to ignore the millions of articles that might suggest otherwise. So be it. Two can play that game ...
I can point to millions of peer reviewed articles which assert that many prescription drugs have side effects that far outweight their alleged beneficial effects. Do I need to start posting all of the ones that have been pulled from the marketplace in just the last couple of years to illustrate the point?
Heck, let's start with Thalidomide. Nothing to see here, it was a perfectly safe efficacious prescription drug with no known side affects, right? Went through rigorous testing and clinical trials perfectly, right? If there were any problems here, they were so miniscule that the benefit of the drug was assured, right? Hit the marketplace and folks were totally protected by the USP quality of the production under the FDA approval process, right? Only there really were some undesirable effects, weren't there? which didn't come out until the drug was used by a large group of people?
or maybe you just don't recall that there was a problem with this side effect? there's a fair number of folk who have had their lives somewhat adversely impacted by the use of this drug, which was an FDA approved product. Too bad for them, huh? and the company that made the product got off scott free, right? everybody was happy, right?
Wanna' go down this road with a host of other drugs which have been removed from the marketplace because they had just a few little "side effects"? How about the ones that the FDA has removed from the market because they didn't do what they were claimed to do to begin with? Wanna' bet I can't start posting a fair number of those, too?
Let's try a few more, OK? from Bloomberg, in 2009
"Half of the 21 drugs pulled from the market in the U.S. for safety reasons since 1995 involved heart complications, a finding that is spurring Congress and doctors to call for closer government review of side effects.
The products were on the market from 11 months to 30 years, based on a review of Food and Drug Administration data obtained by Bloomberg. GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s diabetes drug Avandia, marketed for 11 years, narrowly avoided a recall last week when the FDA restricted its use as a result of a link to heart ailments only uncovered after the drug was in wide use. The agency is now reviewing heart risks for Abbott Laboratories’ diet pill Meridia, sold since 1997."
I'll point us in the direction of dexenfluramine and fenfluramine; I know two people who got heart valve problems from these two. A minor side effect, no? Just keep on telling us that the FDA approval process is air tight and folks are imagining that they are getting ill from the prescription meds they took under a doc's care and supervision, and everything's gonna be OK, right?
Just who do you think you're fooling?
Overall, my take on the marketplace is that there's been a lot more folk injured or killed with prescription drugs in the USA than ever adversely affected by supplements .... OH, I forgot. Those supplements are merely expensive placebos, so they can't be efficacious and are simply a waste of money ... according to you. Yup, indeed, the pharmaceutical industry under the auspices of the FDA is incapable of making mistakes compared to the sloppy uncontrolled environment of the supplement industry snake oil sales people.
I heard a rumor that most of the snake oil supplements are nothing but "monkey sh*t and sawdust", and I'll bet that you can and will be the first to confirm that as factual, can't you? After all, you've probably inspected all of the plants and know firsthand that they are run at the level of a slaughterhouse that U Sinclair documented years ago ....
I worked, years back, for a company that did testing for companies to meet FDA standards. I had the opinion that the FDA was horribly corrupt. It could have changed since then, but the influence of large businesses on them and the way that they'd bend for them was incredible. Doing the right thing was only the consideration the man who was the head of our department who would not buckle under pressure. I wonder how many noble people are out there now holding their ground to that government agency?
It's my opinion that the FDA often acts as an arm of big pharma and rather than work to increase the health of the public is on a witch hunt to knock down the competition.
It's a shame that there really is no unbiased source in government that the public can trust. Thank goodness that there are some doctors and hospitals who are educating themselves in alternate therapies, circumventing the advice and power of the pharmaceutical industry.
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