Posted on 06/18/2009 4:23:19 AM PDT by foutsc
In the caveat emptor category... "There's at least 10 times more hoodia sold in this country than made in the world, so people are not getting hoodia," said Dr. Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon and frequent Oprah Winfrey guest who occasionally has touted the stuff. (Source: Breitbart) Why would anyone take weight loss advice from Oprah?Lead in ginkgo pills. Arsenic in herbals. Bugs in a baby's colic and teething syrup. Toxic metals and parasites are part of nature, and all of these have been found in "natural" products and dietary supplements in recent years.
Multinationals ravage third-world biospheres at the behest of Oprah watchers. A snake oil salesman appeared on her show said some exotic tea berry or wormwood bark was the magic bullet for weight loss, and pristine forests are stripped bare, and useless junk is bottled and sold as the fountain of youth to gullible boomers.
I’d sooner take abstinence advice from Jenna Jameson
Why would anyone take financial advice from a Marxist like Obama?
Rosie O’Donnell would be a much better authority on the subject of weight loss, as well as physics.
Wouldn’t we all!
good point!
Its all “kid-ology” again. The simple fact is that very few people really need to take food supplements, and even then only for specific reasons or for short periods of time. If you are doing a strict diet where you are severely curtailing your food intake, you might need to supplement your micronutrient intake - but a good multivitamin tablet will sort that. Theres little evidence that any other of these creams and additives and potions do much good.
The article appears to be part of an initiative to give the FDA something it has been slobbering for for many years—control over supplements.
There is some real junk out there, to be sure. But there are also supplement giants that are fanatic about purity. For example, lef.org identified the adulteration of Chinese products at least 15 years ago. They don’t sell China-sourced products. They have a separate testing wing that tests for adulterants and that what they sell actually contains what it is supposed to. Of course, they are more expensive.
On another note, the number of injuries and deaths attributable to supplements is miniscule. The number of injuries and deaths attributable to FDA certified drugs is quite large.
Giving the FDA control over supplements seems, basically, crazy. They would destroy a large American industry with quite a good safety track record and a lot of jobs along with it.
Right on! What ever happened to common sense?
Maybe that's because FDA certified drugs actually offer some efficacy while the benefits offered by supplements are most often imagined. Creating sophisticated drugs to treat complex maladies ain't easy. The drugs may produce side effects that are acceptable in clinical trials involving thousands of patients but produce deadly results in a few patients when used by millions of people.
The public wants the drug companies to deliver silver bullets without any side effects but cringes at the thought of someone ensuring supplement companies deliver what they claim is in the package. These same people also find it unreasonable when the govt. requires supplement companies to deliver the benefits they promise. This hypocrisy is not lost on everyone.
A bit of hyperbole there, eh?
Because supplements (herbal and otherwise) are about as efficacious as placebos?
False premise. Invalid argument.
My argument is invalid but comparing deaths from supplements to deaths from pharmaceuticals is valid and germane?
Do you believe the Codex storm troopers and their jackbooted allies at the FDA are coming to your house to take away your vitamin C? Or, do you think the FDA is more interested in ensuring that these unregulated businesses are selling you the ingredients and the quantities that they say they're providing? Do you think they're interested in holding the supplement companies accountable for the claims they make about the efficacy of their products? Hyperbole? Where?
Remind me again why you replied to me.
Let's review: I posted a comment (post #11) and you responded (to post #11) by suggesting I was engaged in a bit of hyperbole. I asked you to identify, specifically, where I was being hyperbolic and you responded by cutting and pasting something from a completely different post. WTF?
Either you can identify where I was engaged in hyperbole (and defend your suggestion) or you can't. The fact that you've resorted to misdirection and another false premise -- argumentum ad hominem (LOL! you need to look up what that means) -- makes me believe it's the latter.
Threatening to run away pretty much concludes that you can't defend your comment, or anything else you agreed on with ModelBreaker (Exactly Correct!)
Maybe you shouldn't have replied in the first place.
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