DoJ Going After Makers of Dietary Supplement (reuters.com) 161
schwit1 writes: Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, have announced criminal and civil actions related to unlawful advertising and sale of dietary supplements. "Six executives with USPlabs LLC and a related company, S.K. Laboratories, face criminal charges related to the sale of unlawful dietary supplements. Four were arrested on Tuesday and two are expected to surrender, the Justice department said. The indictment says that USPlabs used a synthetic stimulant manufactured in China to make Jack3d and OxyElite Pro but told retailers that the supplements were made from plant extracts." The FTC is working on this as well, and their press release has more details. The DoJ's case involves "more than 100 makers and marketers" of these supplements. It's about time.
Consistent (Score:5, Insightful)
You can lie all you want about what the ingredients do, but you can't get away with lying about what they are.
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The Nutraceuticals part sounds all sciencey and healthy too, but means nothing really.
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The supplement industry as a whole is typically that way. And while TFS states "It's about time", I'm not so sure.
People who buy this shit seem like they WANT to get ripped off. If you try to explain to them scientifically why the claims don't make sense, they'll respond with some spiel about how how it makes them feel so much better, how they never get sick anymore (I roll my eyes when I hear people make the later claim, especially when they claim shit like vegetarian diets make them never sick anymore) wh
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I don't mind people buying the crap, stuffing their face with it and croaking.
I fuckin' DO mind if they stuff that shit into their kids to allegedly cure things like Autism with the sole reason to get away with their MbP screw loose.
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Did anyone die? Did people get what they paid for?
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More importantly, you can actually have scientific evidence to back up claims, but not be able to make the claims because the claims themselves are reserved for "Drugs". Walnuts are drugs, but only if you claim the scientific proof of what they do. Can't have that now can we?
It isn't that walnuts are drugs. It isn't that the effects of walnuts isn't provable. It is that to claim what studies have shown, makes walnuts into "drugs" per FDA, and thus the walnut packagers cannot mention the scientific evidence
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Any company called Sunrise Nutraceuticals LLC just sounds suspect to me.
The Nutraceuticals part sounds all sciencey and healthy too, but means nothing really.
Mere names mean nothing as well, unless you're ignorant enough to believe "Marlboro" and "Budweiser" are somehow health products peddled by caring and loving executives.
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Can't help but to notice the resemblance between the snake oil peddlers and the politicians.
With Ben Carson you can have both.
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Just like Tiger Woods isn't Oriental (Tai / Chinese) because he is black, Obama isn't white because he is black.
In other words, I love how people love to say race doesn't matter, when it obviously matters a great deal to them.
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Obama is half white and half black. His father was a black man from Muslim Africa, and his mother is a white woman from Hawaii.
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yeah, I said as much. He's not half anything.
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_____________________________
If health came in a bottle , everyone would have it.
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When you got explosive shits, you stop worrying about headaches.
It works!
This is how it should be (Score:2)
There is no way to tell what ingredients will do to an individual. I love peanuts, they are a cheap source or protein for me. They also cause massive allergic reactions and death for some people.
So just make sure if something has peanuts in it that it's labeled.
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You can't make medical claims, which the supplement people are generally careful not to do. At least on the container. And there's a lot of things you can write that look like medical claims but aren't quite.
Regulation please (Score:5, Informative)
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This is America! People should be free to poison other people. Not to worry, the invisible hand of the market will fix it, or a guy with a gun.
AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!
Canada is fucked too (Score:1)
Similar issues in Canada, where - so long as ingredients are mentioned in some book somewhere - you can make a natural remedy [www.cbc.ca] and have it on the shelves regardless of whether it really works or not.
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Walnuts are poison because scientifically they have proven beneficial to certain heart conditions? That's right, Walnuts can't make a scientifically provable claim, because the claim is reserved for drugs. Nice strawman though.
Re: Regulation please (Score:3)
regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically
There's no magic involved. The FDA effectively bans the chemicals, people want them anyway, retailers find a way (these were usually kept under the checkout counter). I've tried this stuff, it did little for me and wasn't worth the price, but some people did see benefits. Everybody buying it was aware of the rouse - you can't accidentally ask for the stuff stored under the register. Nobody thought it contained flower extracts.
The ban is the entire reason
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By god, you're right. We'd get far better Meth if we didn't regulate the crap out of it and banned more and more precursors, forcing manufacturers into using worse and worse synthesis ways. And with many manufacturers of Meth competing with each other for the market, we'd eventually end up with the purest, most potent shit that's ever gotten us sky high!
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You sir are my new hero.
Meth for all! Down with regulation!
Do you think Meth would help APK or hinder him?
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right on cue.
who needs doctors and pharmacists, and all that training they go through to learn about dosages, and interactions, side effects, and every other detail that could fill a book?
see the racks of drugs in the pharmacy at walgreens? thousands of them
just open it up, and let the customers walk through it themselves and decide for themselves.
im sure everything will be fine.
Regulation, but after we feel better? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's nothing more squirmy than listening to a Religious Libertarian explain why medicine regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically be fewer deaths or organ damage caused if the Invisible Hand were left unhindered.
I'd like to draw a line between Religious Libertarians and smug physicians and point out that *both* ends of the line cause unnecessary medical suffering.
The themes "do no harm regardless of cost" and "federal agency takes the blame for safety, but not the costs" have driven medical research to a standstill for the last 40 years.
There can be no medicines for afflictions that affect less than a billion people, simply because it takes $1.5 billion [acs.org] to bring a drug to market.
We're running out of antibiotics(*), we've already got diseases which are impervious to *all* antibiotics, and there are no new ones in the horizon.
Someone here (on slashdot) put this into perspective: peanuts would not be allowed under FDA rules.
Let's take peanuts as an example for discussion. Considering that they are easy to grow, and can be nourishing, can we outline an FDA procedure that costs less than $1.5 billion, and yet addresses the issues in a sane manner?
Let's divide this by a factor of 1,000: Can we get good safety regulations for peanuts for under $1.5 million?
I think we could. I'm not a Religious Libertarian, but from a purely mathematical standpoint it's obvious that letting people die because the treatment isn't known safe (absence of evidence is evidence of absence) is less efficient than the middle ground.
Probably more - I think more people die because we don't have working antibiotics than die from complications of supplements.
(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones. If we had 25 separate antibiotics and used them in a staggered pattern 5 years each (5 years of use, followed by 20 years of abstinence) we would never lack for working antibiotics.
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(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock
Honestly the whole opposition to antibiotics in livestock is inhumane. A lot of morons out there perpetuate the myth that antibiotics are given to healthy animals (they aren't unless the herd has been infected and they need to inoculate to prevent spread of disease) and that antibiotics in livestock make it to your plate (they don't.) Likewise, they also don't contribute to multi-drug resistant bugs; that's actually caused almost entirely by overly sterile hospital environments, and those bugs ORIGINATE in
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And some of the antibiotics and their metabolites do make it into milk, feces, and urine.
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A lot of morons out there perpetuate the myth that antibiotics are given to healthy animals (they aren't unless the herd has been infected and they need to inoculate to prevent spread of disease)
And there are even more morons out there that never check their facts. It took me less than a minute to find a Dutch governmental report, Health Council of the Netherlands: Committee on Antimicrobial growth promotors. Antimicrobial growth promotors. Rijswijk: Health Council of the Netherlands, 1998; publication no. 1998/15. [gezondheidsraad.nl], on the widespread use of antibiotics in the livestock industry to promote growth.
Of course they don't call them antibiotics in the industry, they are labelled as "antimicrobial performa
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Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones.
That's not true anymore. Several strains of resistance have been tracked down to specific industrial farms.
And to inject my opinion in the discussion: the marketers who've been claiming for decades that it's OK to daily feed antibiotics to cattle, never mind all the indications to the contrary, should be given the death penalty for all the irreparable damage it's gonna cause.
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If the Food and Drug Administration regulated food??
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The FDA, where Whole milk is dangerous and 32 Vaccine shots are "safe"
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You have to admit, it would eventually be a cure for stupid...
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Personally, I would prefer a point between the extremes. The FDA should mandate limits on toxicity, accurate labeling of contents, and reasonably accurate warnings for risks. It should certify efficacy, and it should recommend consulting a doctor (for drugs that are currently prescription only).
I agree that NO regulation is a problem and also that over regulation is a problem. The current FDA seems to be the worst of both worlds. While they do everything in their power to expand the range of their regulatio
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"certify efficacy"
That's your rabbit hole right there. Not only can no amount of paperwork do such a thing for most supplements, that requirement would almost guarantee that nothing new could be discovered.
We're not talking about something like an antibiotic, where it cures a disease in a short time and is easy to see. Where some scientist had a theory and tested it out in a safe and controlled manner. We're talking about concentrated food in a capsule, that may or may not have some effect on you, but it's
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No rabbit hole. Note that the FDA's certification would not be at all necessary to legally sell a product. That would be a voluntary process, Likewise, seeing a doctor before using a prescription recommended drug would be voluntary. Only the toxicity, QC, and labeling requirements would be mandatory.
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Ah. That's what industry groups are for. If they are doing a good job (which they do), then as a taxpayer, why would I want to take on that cost for no additional benefit?
Additionally, once trusted industry groups are known, then the pool of companies that should be closely monitored, like these guys, shrinks considerably.
So what were you thinking the fee would be, to submit your supplement, let's say it's fiber, to the FDA for efficacy certification?
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Honestly, I don't know what the fee might be. That would depend on way too many unknown (to me) variables. But I don't see why private certification groups couldn't co-exist.
Re:Regulation please (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason this "supplement" law got passed was reaction to total stupidity in the other direction -- the FDA was trying to assert power to require a prescription for vitamins.
I kind of like Jerry Pournelle's proposal -- it should be perfectly legal to sell snake oil, as long as the bottle accurately describes the ingredients, and contains actual oil from actual snakes. And, under the Pournelle Rule, these bozos would be perfectly open to prosecution, since they didn't put whatever weird organic compounds some quack in China whomped up on their label.
I absolutely do not want the FDA preventing me from getting vitamin D pills with more than 400 units of D.
Re:Regulation please (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, no. The claim is anybody was trying to force consumers to get a prescription to purchase supplements is bogus. http://www.snopes.com/politics... [snopes.com]
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To be clear: There is a lot of interest in forcing the supplement industry to document that their products are both safe and effective (like, you know, every other over the counter medication) but that's it.
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I can't remember the arguments against proper testing and labeling but the minister involved backed down and it all went away.
Someone was even on the radio defending homeopathic remedies, and I remember her stating something along the lines that the manufacturers would go out of business if they were forced into having independent tes
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no.
innocent before proven guilty does not (or should not) apply in the realm of consumer safety, particularly for things we put in our bodies to achieve certain results after being led to believe there is some physical or medical benefit to it.
that's how people die.
and they have.
even though libertarians like to ignore history.
and your analysis of medical costs is also completely detached from reality, as is your suggestion that we shouldn't require doctors to have medical licenses. again: simple history is
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I generally trust Snopes, but I think I'll go with my actual memory of the time over Snopes on this one. (I'm probably way older than most of the people here.) The story they're debunking is some goofy rumor about the Obama administration; this was back in the 80s or 90s, as I recall.
I don't do all the wacky stuff. Having reached a certain age, B12 supplements are a good idea. I'm also prescribed stupid amounts of time-release niacin for cholesterol control which I'd actually prefer not to take; hot flash
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Actually, Snopes is notorious for using Strawmen for their "debunking". They frame the question, and use one of the more ridiculous examples, rather than the actual one people want to see. I've Caught them enough times to find the whole site more or less untrustworthy as a reference.
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Yeah... Like the silly "Obama's doing it" rumor they rightly debunked, leaving the FDA rule proposal from the previous century un-remarked-on.
Snopes does have their biases, granted. They seem more likely to rigorously "put to the question" things that go against their biases than those that agree with them. But I haven't caught them in a lie. If they say they've researched something, my impression is that they have researched what they said they researched, and got the answers they say they got. An hones
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The problem with that rule is that it presumes people are reasonable -- as in still in possession of their reason.
I have a young relative who is an anti-vaxxer. She's not stupid; she's paranoid -- about corporations and authority figures. It's the left-wing version of the right wing's hysterical climate denialism. Unfortunately she's not only nutty; she's also extremely charismatic. She's set herself up as a "certified" alternative health coach and she's recently started spreading anti-chemotherapy prop
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although I think I've dissuaded her not to do that.
You may want to rethink that strategy and instead dissuade he from doing it, or convince her not to do it. When you combine them, you are encouraging her to do it.
Double negatives are fun :)
As far as Vitamin D, some people need those pills. If you don't naturally produce vitamin D (rickets and other diseases), you need large doses to maintain the levels to remain healthy. Who wants to take 10 400 unit pills to maintain proper levels of vitamin D?
Optimum health? (Score:3)
How much benefit do you think you'll actually get by sucking down all that D in pill form? How much of that does your body actually put to use, if any? Or would you rather listen to the pill pusher's unchallenged cure-all claims and chomp on your placebo like a good consumer.
Let's take a trip down memory lane and recall how the RDA for vitamin D was established.
The FDA measured the amount of vitamin D people were getting throughout America, and then took the average value.
As anyone who isn't a physician can tell you, people living in the Northern latitudes get less vitamin D because they get less sunshine, and depending on where you live, from November through February you aren't getting any at all. And vitamin D has a half-life of about 6 weeks in the body, which is why we hav
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As anyone who isn't a physician can tell you, people living in the Northern latitudes get less vitamin D because they get less sunshine, and depending on where you live, from November through February you aren't getting any at all. And vitamin D has a half-life of about 6 weeks in the body, which is why we have a "cold and flu" season: once we stop getting sunshine, everyone's D levels drop low enough to depress our immune system.
Not exactly. The FDA recommendation assumes that you aren't receiving any D vitamin from sunlight at all. This assumption actually works universally because if you already have sufficient D in your blood, then it causes negative feedback so that your skin doesn't end up creating more than is necessary. So whether you get lots of sun or none, you won't overdose on D so long as you take the recommended amount.
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Sure, but it is an open question of whether ingested megadoses of Vitamin C behave the same way, which was the poster's question. Sometimes nutrients act differently depending on how you get them; for example taking calcium supplements increases you chances of getting kidney stones, but eating the same amount in calcium-rich foods for some reason does not. So it's at least conceivable that getting 50,000 units of D through your gut might be a different story than 50,000 generated in your skin.
In any case
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"... why we have a "cold and flu" season: once we stop getting sunshine, everyone's D levels drop low enough to depress our immune system."
Citation needed. At least Wikipedia states: "Beyond its use to prevent osteomalacia or rickets, the evidence for other health effects of vitamin D supplementation in the general population is inconsistent.[5][6]"
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We need more studies about absorption of vitamins to figure out how to make them work better. As it stands the majority of our vitamins are simply pissed out the same day we take them instead of being absorbed and used.
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As usual you are assuming someone can't pay their own bills. Instead of thinking positive, that the person has taken responsibility for themselves and planned ahead by having money put aside, you're assuming all people are complete idiots and thus necessary to make everyone suffer by forcing them to hand over their money to a private company.
Just goes to show how ridiculous your argument is when one considers how many people ar
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Frankly, it would be far cheaper that way, and it is how almost every other western country does it.
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You do realize that in the case of a car accident (what you appear to be referencing) the medical care is paid for by the car insurance, not health insurance. Health insurance will actually deny the claim if they find out the injuries were caused by a car accident, even a hit and run.
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Again? I don't know if he ever started taking his meds, but he sure needs to go in for a med check.
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If that was the case, then the FDA wouldn't have announced an incoming nationwide trans fat ban.
Also if that was the case, then there would be FDA approval for certain surgical procedures that you can't get done here.
Take for example, I myself need corneal cross-linking to halt the progression keratoconus, which has been done safely in other countries for about 17 years now. A company called Avedro is lobbying really hard to get it approved so that they can start selling the equipment and drugs required to
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That would
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For I-know-not-what cultural or historical reasons, Utah is ground zero for the American 'dietary supplement' industry(since many of these companies also use multilevel marketing arrangments; the joke is that 'MLM' stands for 'mormons losing money'). Senator Orrin Hatch obliged his ho
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Ephedra didn't kill that many people, and the ones it did kill went way beyond any reasonable dose for months. Had they exceeded the dose of acetaminophen by the same amount, they would have been dead in a couple weeks.
I have to wonder, if the labeling on the bottle hadn't had to be so circumspect in order to avoid the FDA, perhaps the users would have been more careful how much they took.
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Outright poisonous plants are not illegal. You can buy hemlock plants, wolfsbane flowers, belladonna plants, foxgloves, and daturas as ornamentals, if you so wish. If you choose to eat them, and subsequently die from it, well too damn bad. (fyi, daffodils are also poisonous.)
But-- anything that might make you jumpy or might cause euphoria is a controlled substance, for the most part. ephedra falls into this category, as does the coca plant, peote cactus, psilocybin mushrooms, and a wealth of others.
Clearl
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I dont want a regulatory agency policing based on public opinion
Oxymoronic desire you have there.
Regulatory Agency is funding in by politicians who get elected on the basis of public opinion. The fact that you THINK they are removed from each other (public/agency) is cute.
I am a Libertarian, and oppose most regulations because of this very reason. It isn't that all regulation is bad, it is that some of the resulting regulations are REALLY bad (awful). It will point out that Cannabis is so regulated that any potential good that it also might provide is negated by the fea
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It's already illegal to poison people.
Why would you forbid me to buy rose hips or dandelion essence or whatever? Ah, you wouldn't forbid. You would regulate to the point that only Johnson & Johnson could possibly sell the stuff.
You'd use this lying about ingredients to impose the strict regulations you wanted all along, and put all supplement makers out of business.
Holy crap are we trading freedom for safety.
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Ideally, I'd like a strong regulatory agency that inspects manufacturing facilities, lab tests products, and enforces truth in labeling. I'd prefer just about anything to be legal, as long as it is as labeled.
It is crazy, but right now most food and supplements are completely uninspected. It could be anything in there, grocery store wide.
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That is not true about the completely uninspected thing. They can come anytime they want with the authority of God's nephews. I'm sure statistics can be had that show that a Federal employee has not inspected the majority of sites in a given year. But believe me, you live in fear of the FDA if you're in the industry. Well, except I guess, these guys. I bet they got the fear now.
And everything you listed; inspect, test, enforce; I am in complete agreement with. That is exactly what the FDA is supposed to be
Re: Regulation please (Score:2)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mel+... [duckduckgo.com]
The F
snake oil, good fer what ails ya. (Score:2)
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They're sort the opposite of a snake oil salesman. They said they were selling (useless) plant extracts but were actually selling a potent synthetic stimulant.
Oh! Oh! (Score:1)
What about Mannatech [youtube.com]?
Result of the Idiots Hatch and Harkin (Score:5, Insightful)
This re-created the snake oil industry that the FDA had killed, with but minor regulations preventing extreme claims - and also made it difficult for the FDA to prosecute if the company did make those claims.
Hatch and Harkin killed more Americans than most Senators, and helped enrich a whole generation of scamsters.
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They must have been friends of that snake-oil salesman Dr. Oz.
We also have a snake-oil salesman running for POTUS right now.
Here he is doing a commercial for Mannatech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Yes, the Hatch essentially turned the regulations upside down;
Previously, you could only use ingredients that had been proven safe.
Afterward, you could use any ingredient you wanted...until it was proven dangerous.
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Given that proving something safe can only be done by big corporations, and will only be done if they stand to make a return on investment.... fuck that philosophy.
Labeling GMO products (Score:1)
Yet they still won't enforce the labeling of GMO products. How in the world is a forward looking person to seek out genetically altered produce if it isn't identified as such? Sure, we can avoid things labeled as "organic", but from what I understand that is no guarantee that the product has not actually been improved by science. One can not benefit from science if one is not made aware that science has provided a alternative to nature. We really need much better truth in labeling laws in the US.
Horsefeathers (Score:2)
Further Reading (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since I have no mod points today to give you, I'll just say "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" is indeed an *excellent* film that presents a refreshingly non-hysterical look at doping and supplements in athletics.
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Gotta love a documentary that takes a good swipe at Arnold Schwarzenegger too for being a bad roll model that claimed to support healthy living but did every steroid and HGH ever made.
Wait... (Score:2)
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Now and then for HARMFUL supplements (Score:2)
hu hu sheng wei (Score:2)
As long as the FDA doesn't mess with the dick pills that I buy at the gas station. I like that they're right by the counter with the 5-hour energy, slim jims and cherry-flavored Philly blunts. Makes for efficient one-stop shopping.
They were in the wrong market sector (Score:2)
Take Ford. By their own admission, they have killed over 125 (or is it 150 or 200 or ???) people with a bad ignition switch. It's called mass murder. Except that you will never hear that phrase on TV or in the press. Why? Just notice how many car commercials there are on TV and in the press. No connection at all, just ask any ethical journalist. You'll find one riding a unicorn.
You know what happened to Ford? No
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The faulty ignition switch was a GM issue not a Ford issue. Ford doesn't get out scott free however as they were the ones that created the Pinto
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Yea the Pinto that miraculously explodes when hit from the rear and the trunk is full of explosives.
In all seriousness the car did have a significant design flaw, a flaw that exists in a lot of cars because it's actually pretty hard to protect a tank of fluid that is more explosive than dynamite.
Re:They were in the wrong market sector (Score:4, Informative)
No one is going to take you seriously if you can't get simple facts straight.
"Take Ford. By their own admission, they have killed over 125 (or is it 150 or 200 or ???) "
It was GM, not Ford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
bureaucrats can't fight ISIL attack supplements (Score:1)
Supplements, "spice" and other fake drugs (Score:2)
Is the entire weight loss supplement market really just an attempt to re-create the magic of the good old days of Dexedrine for weight loss? Just like "space" and all the synthetic fake marijuana is an attempt to get around legal prohibition of marijuana?
I wonder if we'd be better off just selling Dexedrine for weight loss. This way people would at least be taking a well-known substance with well-known risks and more or less predictable results, versus god knows what ("now with Melamine!") synthetics from
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> In Australia, to sell supplements companies have to be able to show the ingredients are what the label says and must confirm structure and function.
So we can just order from Aussie companies to get stuff that has been vetted?
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I took that stuff for years and it was the best pre-workout supplement. I know it was risky/dangerous but man that stuff actually worked. Nothing else like it. Thanks (aka fuck you) to the US government agencies who won't let adults make their own decisions on what's best for them.
If it's results you're after and don't give a shit about your health, then just take steroids.
If you're unconcerned about safety, why even bother with legality...
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This is how our government is spending its time? When we're being infiltrated by terrorists, when Walmart is fleecing the taxpayer for $billions in welfare, and when Donald Trump is running for President, they're focusing their efforts on the mislabeling of something that any reasonable person knows is snake oil anyway?
No wonder our country is so fucked up.
Uh, our country is also rather fucked up because of the massive lack of "reasonable" people who don't know any better.
Of course, with the narcissist generation, it's almost impossible to tell if that's genuine stupidity or merely fashionable YOLO.