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Food

Dietary Supplements Are Doing Much More Measurable Harm Than Good

It turns out that supplements—especially those marketed for weight loss and energy enhancement—lead to around 23,000 emergency room visits a year.
Photo via Flickr user Adam Chandler

In the 2009 cinematic tour de force that is Old Dogs, the now sadly deceased Robin Williams and walking toupee that is John Travolta are seen mixing up their old man pills in what in retrospect can only be explained as some sort of anti-pill-taking PSA. It's also about as mature as a night of Apples to Apples chased down by a box of Yellowtail, but that's beside the point. These raconteurs of celluloid obviously saw into the future—and it contains a frightening menagerie of life-taking supplements.

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Which just so happens to be the theme of what we'll be talking about today.

READ: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Muscle Supplement Might Pump You Up with Banned Drugs

An authoritative new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and led by scientists from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provides a disturbing look at the world of dietary supplements.

It turns out that supplements—especially those marketed for weight loss and energy enhancement—lead to around 23,000 emergency room visits a year. And more than a quarter of these visits are by people aged 20 to 34, a disproportionately large number. They visit the ER complaining of nasty symptoms like chest pain, heart palpitations, and irregular heart rhythms. The study covered a large network of hospitals around the country over a 10-year period.

Weight loss and energy supplements often contain a variety of herbs and extracts and are widely advertised online, in magazines, and on television. The researchers pointed to a variety of products including Hydroxycut, Xenadrine, Raspberry Ketones, and Black Jack Energy.

One of the most surprising results of the study was that cardiovascular problems were even more commonly associated with these supplements than with amphetamines or Adderall, both of which can only be obtained by prescription and both of which carry warnings about their potential to cause cardiac side effects.

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READ: The Creators of Vitamin-Infused Vodka Say It Will End Hangovers

Supplements, on the other hand, are lightly regulated and do not have to carry such a label. Since 1994, federal law deems supplements "safe until proven otherwise." In other words, they do not have to be approved by the FDA before they are sold, and they do not have to list possible side effects.

So if you thought, "if they allow it to be sold, it must be safe," you're sadly wrong.

Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School told the New York Times, "This is very disheartening. What we're seeing from this study is that the system has failed. It's failing to protect consumers from very serious harms."

The dietary supplements business is a huge one, with $32 billion in sales per year. Critics say that the low level of regulation is a danger to the public. This study is the first to show that severe injuries and hospitalizations tied to supplements are, well, enormous. It did not look at how many deaths resulted.

So, be careful what you put in your body. You don't have to be an Old Dog and mix up your pills with a friend's to land yourself in the hospital.