blog: Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic [Respectful Insolence]

Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic [Respectful Insolence]:

It's no secret that over the years I've been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we've pointed out time and time again, the DSHEA is not about health, and it's certainly not about education. Indeed, perhaps my favorite description of this law comes from blog bud and all around awesome internist Dr. Peter Lipson, who refers to it as a "travesty of a mockery of a sham." Rather, it's about allowing supplement manufacturers and promoters of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM, with or without a preceding "s," depending on your taste) who do not want pesky things like government laws and regulations to interfere with their selling of pseudoscience to market various compounds as "dietary supplements" with near-impunity. As Harriet Hall once put it so accurately, the DSHEA is "a stealth weapon that allows the sale of unproven medicines just as long as you pretend they are not medicines."
The DSHEA accomplishes this by making a seemingly reasonable distinction between food and medicine and twisting it in such a way that allows manufacturers to label all sorts of botanicals and various other compounds, many of which have substances in them with pharmacological activity, and sell them as "supplements" without prior approval by the FDA before marketing.
As long as the manufacturer is careful enough not to make health claims that are too specific, namely that the supplement can diagnose or treat any specific disease, and sticks to "structure-function" statements ("it boosts the immune system!"), almost anything goes, particularly if a Quack Miranda Warning is included.
Not surprisingly, given what a big business supplements have become in this country largely due to the DSHEA, manufacturers and CAM advocates fight tooth and nail against any attempt to update the DSHEA to correct some of its more unfortunate consequences. Led by supplement industry lap dog Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who together make up a bipartisan tag-team in defense of the supplement industry and do their best to block any effort to increase its regulation by the FDA. We saw that most recently when Arizona Senator John McCain, of all people, introduced a bill in 2010 to try to tighten up the DSHEA and was thoroughly slapped down by Orrin Hatch. More recently, not satisfied with how good things are for the supplement industry, another bipartisan team of woo-friendly legislators (both from Utah, naturally), U.S. Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Jared Polis introduced the Free Speech About Science Act, which basically seeks to allow the supplement industry to make more liberal claims about its products. All it will need is a "peer-reviewed" paper to support it (Mark and David Geier would do!), and you can claim almost anything. Anything to grow the supplement industry, which is currently around $30 billion a year.
That's why it's critical, from time to time, to look at actual evidence, and just last week Maria Elena Martinez, PhD, of the University of California San Diego, and co-authors did in a commentary published online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute entitled Dietary Supplements and Cancer Prevention: Balancing Potential Benefits Against Proven Harms.

As several of us have pointed out before, there are science-based roles for supplementation. For instance, in the case of nutritional deficiencies, and Martinez et al point out the very same thing:
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