05.mar.07
The Edmonton Journal
Norman J. Temple, a nutrition professor at Athabasca University who has published more than 50 papers in academic journals, as well as nine books, writes that there are hundreds of nutrition researchers in Canada and the United States and every aspect of diet and health comes under scrutiny.
Yet, for some reason, one topic has been almost ignored, namely the way hundreds of supplements with no proven value are being sold to a gullible public. The people of Canada are being swindled out of hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Temple says that some supplements may be useful. A daily vitamin-mineral supplement can be beneficial for many people. There are a handful of other supplements where scientific studies have produced positive results. For example, chondroitin and glucosamine are helpful in arthritis, while St. John's Wort is often effective in depression, at least in less severe cases.
But if the folks who market supplements contented themselves with only those products where the science is strong, then sales would be low.
It all boils down to money and market expansion. Most supplements that actually do something useful cost no more than four dollars per month. But millions have been persuaded that what they really need are supplements that cost anything from $20 to $50 per month for each one. And there is a sophisticated industry cashing in on the public's dangerous combination of a quest for health and ignorance of medical science.
What we repeatedly see are claims that reduce the exceedingly complex workings of the body down to concepts that are so simple that anyone can easily understand them. Often, weak evidence is presented as if it were proven fact, while, in many cases, the evidence simply does not exist.
Templerecounts a study conducted in Ontario a few years ago the researcher posed as a mother of a child with Crohn's disease. She visited 32 health food stores and in 23 of them she was offered advice. There was a complete lack of consistency: 30 different supplements were recommended.
Many supplements are sold by multi-level marketing, just like Avon cosmetics. The focus is profit, not consumer health. A few years ago one company put up flyers around Edmonton for a meeting in which they stated that the speaker would be giving the views of a man who they described as "the world's leading viro-immunologist."
Temple could find no evidence that he had ever published a scientific paper.
At the meeting, people were told of the fantastic healing properties of the supplements. The impression was given that they could cure pretty much anything, even cancer.
A similar public lecture in Edmonton was given by another "expert." The advertising described him -- with incredible chutzpah -- as "Widely regarded as the world's No. 1 nutritionist."
The product here was goji juice, which was promoted as: "The biggest discovery in nutrition in the last 40 years!"
The expert emphatically stated that the many benefits of goji juice had been firmly established in clinical studies on humans. But Temple was unable to find a single study in the medical literature that reported a clinical trial showing a positive impact on health or disease.
Supplements are also marketed by way of infomercials on TV and as junk mail. The level of dishonesty here is at least as bad as the above cases.
Temple says to ignore all advice from anyone who is selling supplements. And stay out of health food stores.