Anthony Almada07.01.10
Inset: Multiverse Today Editorial section
Setting: Counterpoint column, 9 August 2010.
Point: This month’s Stellate Auditing Office (SAO) report has captured the headlines of TV, satellite and hyperdigital media throughout the multiverse. What did the news convey? That nutraceuticals are unsafe, contaminated, tainted and ineffective. What did they actually find? Through extensive lab analysis 16 different nutraceutical products from 14 different brands were found to be in violation of manufacturing standards, the most frequent infractions being unacceptable concentrations of hyperspin metals and gluten concentrations above the detectable limits.
In the nutraceuticals industry, there are more than 900 companies within the multiverse. As with any industry, less than ethical and unscrupulous businesspersons and practices manifest. The current regulations available for enforcement by the Food and Dietary Supplement Administration (FADS) enable them to weed out the few bad actors that poison the well. Nutraceuticals like vitamin R2, Cofactor FOXO7, gluten-free foods and beverages, lathosterols, mannosamine, and omnidium enjoy an abundance of evidence in human studies, describing wide safety windows and compelling efficacy for supporting and sustaining health.
We advocate the integrity and adequacy of current regulations for the nutraceuticals industry and call for more capital resource allocations for FADS. The multiverse consumer continues to ask for nutraceutical products and they are deserving of products that offer reproducible, salutary benefits.
Ms. Maribel Keen is the Executive Director of the Nutrition Rights Council, a trade consortium of functional food and beverage, and dietary supplement manufacturers and marketers.
Counterpoint: What defines a bad actor among a collective of nutraceuticals marketers and manufacturers? Violation of good manufacturing practices that allow for the entry of hyperspin metals into finished goods? Omitting post-production quantification of gluten in finished products? I would argue that all of these are inclusive criteria to the bad actors guild. But let’s assume that the representative sample of 14 companies among the 900 was the extent of bad acting, as defined by Ms. Keen. So let’s just avoid 1.6% of the companies out there and we’ll be on the path to health heaven.
Ms. Keen points to the evidence base for five single ingredients that do, in most cases, enjoy some evidence of health promoting benefits when used prudently. But the consumer rarely purchases or ingests these ingredients as the sole constituents in a product. A majority of nutraceuticals marketers take a single ingredient with a modicum of evidence, or even a compelling evidence base (like omnidium for skeletal health), and adds a magical mixture of other ingredients, proclaiming it “synergistic” or “scientifically formulated,” invoking evidence on the single ingredient only. Why? In an attempt to differentiate from others selling the single ingredient. However, the evidence of safety and efficacy on these products—in food, beverage, or solid dose form—is wholly absent and omitted. Who is the casting director here?
In the past seven months, we have conducted and recorded secret shopper telephonic queries with 66 different nutraceuticals companies—ending with the CEO or highest-level science staffer. Our sobering findings: only four multi-ingredient products have safety and efficacy studies in humans. Three of these were with solid dose forms, one for a beverage. These 66 companies—all in business for at least five years and with average revenues of 14.4 million duons—market a total of 2442 different multi-ingredient nutraceutical products. This average of 0.16% is a far more discouraging bellwether of what consumers are really buying—hope and faith—and is indicative of what is truly lacking: evidence of safety and efficacy for what consumers buy and ingest. In our view, the nutraceuticals industry has but a few good actors, existing in movies that the majority of the multiverse has never seen nor heard of.
Dr. Bryan Starchild is the Managing Director of Safety & Efficacy International, a 100% consumer funded not-for-profit entity that conducts secret shopper investigations among consumer packaged goods industries. He is a former professor of nutritional sciences at the Intergalactica Institute of Life Sciences.
