I spend a great deal of my limited TV watching time complaining about the uses and side effects of the drugs advertised in commercials. The eye rolling from my wife, corresponding “here we go again” included, the best response I get, she perhaps has heard it too much. I also spend a lot of time railing against the mis-interpretation of DSHEA common in the health and media communities.
That said, when I see a company in the supplement industry acting irresponsibly, I also feel they must be called out.
I recent came across a supplement whose package claims were so vague as to be absurd. It claimed to be an “anabolic hardening agent”. I use a lot of sport supplements and I have still no clue what that means. When a company makes claims that can not be verified on its products, I get suspicious.
Advertising is the cause of most of my problems and here it is again. I uniformly tell people to ignore the front of any packaging and read the ingredients. So I turned the bottle around.
There were just three ingredients in the supplement. A palm tree extract, Bermuda grass extract, and another plant extract that I had never heard of. Time for researcher guru to step up! By the way, researcher guru is not very quick. The studies to justify the ingredients in the product were at the very best “limited”. They were not human or in vitro or just “traditional use” based. In my opinion that is the same as saying “snake oil”.
This is the the kind of thing that give functional supplements a bad name. It makes it easy to believe that supplements are all hooey and hogwash. To be sure, there is false advertising and useless products in any industry, but the supplement industry starts out because of the generally accepted false claims about its products. Step up or step out!
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