Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News for Students
Between 2007 and 2016, the U.S. government identified nearly 800 food supplements that were contaminated with drugs.
That’s the finding of a new study. Especially disturbing: Most of these tainted products were never removed from store shelves.Food supplements include vitamins and minerals. They also include many products that make health-promoting claims. These might be capsules of supposedly heart-healthy fish oil. Other supplements (such as chondroitin) claim to aid sore joints. Capsules of powdered cinnamon claim to help improve blood sugar levels. More than half of American adults say they take dietary vitamins and other supplements.
The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, regulates these products. It allows them to contain only foods and food-like ingredients. Drugs, such as muscle-building steroids, are not permitted. In all, an estimated 85,000 food supplements are sold in the United States that claim to help boost health in some way. That’s too many, FDA says, for the agency to test them all.
But FDA has logged reports on supplements that have been found to contain potentially harmful things. Prescription drugs would qualify. FDA’s database of those reports is open to the public. Researchers working in Sacramento for the California state government analyzed reports in that database. They focused on the drug contaminants found. They also looked at what the health claims were that companies had made about each supplement that had…
The post Many food supplements unlawfully contain drugs appeared first on FeedBox.