Day 92 – SuppliMENTAL

“You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe“

~ Morpheus

182.4 lbs

People ask me if I’ve been taking supplements while undergoing this starvation project and without giving it much thought I’ve been answering ‘yes’. What I should have said is I’ve been supplementing my vitamin and mineral intake, not “taking supplements”.

What’s the difference?

Supplementing your vitamin intake is, say, taking a vitamin C tablet daily to ward off scurvy. You could just eat more vitamin C rich foods like strawberries, oranges, kiwis, etc. or if you’re really going for that pirate mystique you could suck on a lemon wedge. But if you’re doing something stupid like starving yourself for 100 days and have to watch those calories with almost OCD scrutiny, then supplementing your vitamin deficiency by taking vitamins makes sense.

I’ve also been taking mineral supplements, like potassium, calcium, and zinc. If you’re a Simpson’s fan, you have the same scene playing in your head right now as I did when I wrote this line.

The funny thing is, in the world of pills “supplements” usually means herbal supplements. In that context, am I taking supplements? No frakkin’ way.

Oh, I know they’re popular. They promise to cure everything from joint pain to Dunlap’s disease (you know, when you reach the point of being fat that your belly ” dun lapped” over your belt). Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. You get the picture.

So appealing are the promises in the ads and labels for these herbal wonders that in the US alone people spent $34 billion a year on them. (That doesn’t count the $40 billion a year spent on diet pills, which you could argue are a supplement of sorts). Because of this, the US government spent 10 years and $2.5 billion testing their effectiveness in a study funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The result: they don’t work.

Wait, lemme back up. Ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea. Everything else? Snake oil.

Oh there were arguments. After a top virologist performed a study and found that echinacea was about as effective at curing colds as a placebo, the howling began – despite a pledge, written into NCCAM’s strategic plan, not to equivocate in the face of negative findings.

Similarly, Ginkgo Biloba does squat to help your brain and glucosamine and chondroitin are as effective on arthritis as taking sugar pills.

No one can claim anti alternative medicine bias; alternative therapy practitioners holding 9 of the 18 seats on the board reviewing the studies, as required by their government charter, and many of the studies they approve for funding are done by alternative therapy providers. (Grants have gone to board members, too. Make of that what you will.)

If anything, the NCCAM has been accused of a pro alternative therapy bias: Dr. Joseph Jacobs, who was head of the Office of Alternative Medicine (a smaller federal agency that came before the current one) called NCCAM “the fox guarding the chicken coop. This is not science, it’s ideology on the part of the advocates.” So the negative effects were surprising to all.

So how do supplement makers get away with it? By cherry-picking results of other studies and making a few leaps in logic.

For example, hoodia gordonii is credited as an appetite suppressant and in the lab it was – when a purified extract of the active molecule, called P57, was injected directly into the brains of rats. But taken orally, by humans? Adrienne Youdim, MD, medical director of the Comprehensive Weight Loss Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Michael Steelman, MD, chairman of the board of trustees for the American Society of Bariatric Physicians point out “There is no [published scientific] data to support its use.”

Unless of course the weight loss you’re after is a lighter wallet. Then keep buying it.

Shark cartilage? I’ve already btiched about that when I briefly touched on herbal supplements in the past. Black cohosh? It – ah, I’m going to stop now or we’ll be here all day. Sufficeth to say, the list goes on and on. I’m sure you get the picture by now.

The most insulting thing of all this is that manufacturers know this. In many cases they don’t even bother to measure the amounts they put into the pills they sell.

They also know that, unlike pharmeceuticals (which are heavily regulated), the supplement market is a “free for all” because regulatory agencies like the FDA take an innocent until proven guilty approach. While they can yank harmful drugs, there’s no mechanism to do likewise for herbal supplements with no efficacy. Other agencies may go after the manufacturers if the claims are too over-the-top, as certain makers of ‘enhancement’ pills have discovered.

There is some good news. The actual theraputic treatments  included in the studies came out looking better than the take-this-supplement-for-what-ails-ya crowd: acupuncture does help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may actually relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue.And as I said if you’re undergoing chemotherapy, the ginger might help.

I’m sure I’ll get angry emails and comments from herbal supplement supporters, but the data doesn’t back up what “everyone knows” – or what marketers have tried to convince you.

Footnote: a chain of retail supplement stores offered me a rather lucrative sponsorship of this site. I do allow such things and I admit being tempted – Taking no-pay time off work to starve yourself isn’t the easiest way to pay bills (as you can see by the necessity of including the shameless ‘tip jar’) – but as much as I may be a jerk, I’m not a whore.