Setting the Record Straight About Dietary Supplements

By James J. Gormley

Pick up any newspaper, snap on the radio, glance at the TV --- and you’re sure to be hit by the latest “news” about dietary supplements: how they don’t work, how they’re all tainted with contaminants and laced with pharmaceuticals; and how their manufacturers are out to get us!

The truth, however, is far more reassuring than the headlines make out. Go ahead, Google “dietary supplements” with the name of any of the big networks or newspapers, anything from ABC News to the Chicago Sun-Times or CNN, you name it.

I did: and in top search listings for seven of the country’s leading newspapers and five of its major networks, nearly 70% of the coverage is skeptical and cautionary about dietary supplements.

In fact, if we were to believe mainstream media, not since 1866, in Liberty, Missouri, when the James-Younger Gang’s Wild West rampage of robberies and mayhem began, did we see such a lawless frontier as we supposedly have today in the dietary supplement marketplace.

We know, though, that the Wild West ended in 1890 and that over-the-counter drugs (not supplements) are actually the successors of the Traveling Medicine Show patent medicine tradition.

Real Dangers, Supplements Benefits Overlooked
In fact, our self-appointed guardians of public health (whether wielding Senatorial powers or using a journalist’s pen) almost always forget to discuss those tablets and capsules that are profoundly dangerous and largely toxic: prescription drugs. Each year, prescription drugs injure approximately 2.2 million and kill at least 100,000 Americans.

With about 33,000 dietary supplements on the U.S. market, it’s no surprise that with today’s nutritionally bankrupt diet there were 192 million Americans using supplements, a number that is expected to keep growing.

According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), “These products are intended to be used as supplements to, not substitutes for, a well-balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle.” In addition to wanting to provide a basic nutritional “insurance policy” offered by a multivitamin, people take nutritional supplements for a variety of health-promoting reasons.

In a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners and commissioned by the Natural Products Association, seven out of 10 Americans take supplements because they make them feel better.

So, if supplements are so popular, and good for us, why, we ask, are they getting such a bum rap? Good question.

Feeding the undeservedly bad reputation is a confluence of several factors, including: historically poor government enforcement against a small number of fringe operators; general misunderstanding of how well-regulated the dietary supplement industry actually is; and media feeding frenzies related to high-profile cases that have little, or nothing, to do with the dietary supplement industry, aside from actually showing the regulations effectively working.

Facing Facts
Whenever I hear the term, I invariably think of Warner Oland, in those 1930s-era Charlie Chan movies saying, “You must face facts.”

Sometimes I wish we could bring Oland back (minus the political incorrectness) so Chan could face the bad guys — or in this case the purveyors of untruth — with all of the bald-faced facts that our panel touched on.

But that can’t happen, so it’s up to all of us to be myth-busters on a daily, or weekly or monthly basis — so that one day our guardians of public health will have no choice but to acknowledge what we already know: the power and promise of safe dietary supplements that are produced by a responsible, well-regulated dietary supplement industry: in other words, the facts.

It’s time that conventional researchers begin to design studies that build on vitamin research of the last 50 years rather than attempt to poke holes in what we already all know: vitamins promote health, reduce disease and help people live longer … and better.

Save the Internet

By James J. Gormley

On behalf of Citizens for Health, an IRS-recognized not-for-profit organization with approximately 100,000 individual consumer members across the United States, I ask you to join with me and with FreePress in stating your strongest possible support for Net Neutrality (FCC Docket No. 09-191).

Visit this link: http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/hotdocket/list to file comments directly with the FCC. Once you are there scroll down (it should be near the top) to docket number 09-191 In the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet Broadband industry Practices. Once you click on the 09-191 it will shoot you to a page that already has all the docket details etc. this is the short form that you can use to easily file your comments.

The current Google censorship situation in China is a perfect example of why a 100 percent free and open Internet serves Americans and advances democracy.

Whether it is governments, corporations, advertisers or lobbyists (contributors), none of these groups should have any influence over a 100 percent free and open Internet that encourages the free-est possibly communication of ideas, opinions, facts, information, opportunities, and health information as well, whether it is health information about (or critical of) pharmaceuticals, diet, food, exercise, alternative medicine, herbalism, traditional healing traditions --- it should all be equally available and equally accessible to Americans.

Allowing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the improper ability to slow down, hinder or block certain information (for example information that does not help their advertising partners) would be an outrageous and unacceptable violation of our Constitutional rights and would be wrong, unethical, anti-American and anti-democracy.

Filings by ISPs dare to suggest that this is about dictating to industry or assigning borders to an evolving medium --- that could not be further from the truth.

In point of fact, industry is attempting to gain greater control over what is, for now, a free highway of information and ideas; consumers are merely trying to protect this medium from telephone, wireless and cable companies’ efforts to turn this into an issue of virtual “eminent domain.” If these corporations and their lobbies are successful, it would make a mockery of this freedom and would not only violate article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but would, as noted, violate the U.S. Constitution.

For all of these reasons, and many more, I, on behalf of the 100,000 members of Citizens for Health, ask you to call on the FCC to do the right thing: to pass strong and broad Net Neutrality rules.

Doing this will represent one of the most important regulatory protections any Federal agency can pass this decade, and perhaps even this century --- it will represent a legacy advancing democracy and protecting consumers for us, our children and future generations.