Snake Oil and Vitamins
How the supplement industry steals your money
In 1712 the honor of first patent medicine was granted to a Richard Stoughton in England for an elixir that purportedly did something though what exactly has been lost to time. By the end of the 19th century, these so called “patent medicines” were a booming industry, often marketed with endorsements from well known doctors that probably had no idea their names were connected with the potions at all. These elixirs were mostly a lot of hogwash, filled up with alcohol, turpentine, cocaine and usually some random collection of spices and herbs to make the ingredients sound exotic should anyone ask. Some were just straight up whiskey diluted with a heavy dose of water. But regardless of the ingredients, all were marketed as curealls, magical medicines on the cutting edge that had been discovered by some little known scientist somewhere and could cure whatever ailed you. They could be used topically to ease an aching back, inhaled to bring someone back from the brink of fainting and consumed to cure a failing liver. At some point along this fabulous journey of medicinal nonsense, someone thought to link their liniment with an old Chinese folk remedy of placing the poison from a viper upon a wound and thus, “snake oil” was born. Eventually, as the FDA was formed and people began to realize that these medicines did absolutely fuck all, the term stuck as one of derision and disdain. Slowly, oh so slowly, as the 20th century began to creep into its second and third and fourth decades medical regulations improved. Cocaine was no longer sold over the counter (sometimes, soda parlors even had it on tap!), heroin wasn’t prescribed as an anti-addiction medication, laudanum (a tinctured form of opium) was killed off entirely as it was found to be one of the most lethal drugs ever invented. And the days of using turpentine (basically paint thinner) as a cure for the stomach ache were finally snuffed out. Medicine, and specifically medicines, evolved and people everywhere generally benefitted. But the snake oil didn’t go away.
Before going any farther, I think it’s important to define exactly what a supplement is and how it differs from a “drug.” First off, both of these terms have both legal and scientific definitions that add to the confusion. Legally, some “drugs” may be classified as supplements (an example of this is piracetam, a completely synthetic compound classified as a prescription drug in Russia that is sold as an over the counter supplement in the US). In short, the legal definitions are simple: A drug is deemed unsafe until proven safe, while a supplement is deemed safe until proven unsafe. That’s it. From a more scientific standpoint, a supplement is a compound that is generally produced or consumed naturally, but encapsulated in a form that allows it to “supplement” a diet further. A drug is a unique chemical that can alter a natural state entirely in an unnatural way.
The supplement industry is nothing to brush away. It clocks in at a hefty $36 billion industry with over 68% of all Americans admitting to taking some type of supplement. 84% of Americans total are confident in overall quality and safety of supplements and 78% believe that taking supplements is representative of a healthy lifestyle and that these supplements do exactly what they say they do on the label. So let’s look at one of those labels and see if the product can live up to the hype. For this example I will be using a supplement called “Halotropin” produced by the company ProSupps which specializes in sports and endurance targeted supplements. This particular compound falls into the category of “testosterone booster” and is usually used by individuals looking for a better “pump” while working out. So first off, let’s look at the claims. ProSupps markets Halotropin with the following description: “Halotropin helps your body produce more testosterone while simultaneously unbinding and utilizing your existing free flowing testosterone, and it keeps estrogen in check at the same time. The end result is an explosion in libido, strength, energy, and muscle mass. Unleash your full potential in the gym (and in the bedroom)!” It goes to list some of the miraculous things this completely unregulated, over the counter compound can supposedly do to your body: Increase testosterone production, suppress DHT, suppress estrogen and stimulate androgen receptors. Just take their product, and you’ll get ripped, have an explosion of new energy and motivation and suddenly become a sex god all in one pill! How come everyone isn’t doing this? The answer lies in the ingredients which are very, very telling. Halotropin is made up mostly of some zinc, fenugreek extract, rhodiola rosea root and a handful of pretty much everything else they could think of that has some folk-remedy connection to masculinity at one point in history. But marketing the oil extract of a seed is rather difficult so these manufacturers take a different approach and exploit a loophole. They trademark a compound name that sounds highly scientific and much like a real drug (such as Halotropin) and then simply fill that compound with a proprietary blend of the boring stuff previously listed…and since it’s a trademarked blend, they don’t even need to tell you how much of these individual ingredients they are giving you. It’s much easier to market Halotropin, a test-enhancing proprietary blend of cutting edge nutrients, than “here, eat this root.”
Removing the hype altogether, though, do these products actually do anything?
No. And it is this point that must be stressed.
Every few years or so, the scientific community runs efficacy studies on supplement use, generally on massive sample sizes that range in the tens of thousands of participants. And every few years the same results come back stronger than before: Supplements have little greater effect than a placebo. In at least one study done, it was shown that the majority of supplement users already tend to fall into the demographics of the healthiest people in the country skewing armchair statistics in favor of the supplement companies without giving a fair bell curve to analyze. In 2011, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a report detailing how indiscriminate vitamin use is not only useless for those that do not have a specific deficiency, but can also increase mortality rates in older women. Calcium supplementation has been linked to an increased risk of heart attack. In 2013, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a three part report begging people to stop multivitamin use, saying they have “no clear benefit.” And these are just papers refuting the more reasonable supplement claims for “maintaining” health; the more radical claims coming from some of the fringes of supplement use (such as sports supplements) are even more profoundly trounced.
The supplement industry, like the snake oil of old, is completely unregulated at least in any meaningful way and this can lead to dangerous side effects of manufacturing that most people would trust not to be happening. The FDA has repeatedly found traces of prescription and scheduled drugs like cocaine and Viagra in male enhancement “herbal” pills. But the problem isn’t just with shady “penis pills” companies that lurk on deep web ad space; Vox Media keeps a large active database of known supplement brands that use illegal or dangerous chemicals in their formulations, some of which contain such things as alcohol, steroids, DMAA, sibutramine (a schedule IV weight loss drug) and a host of others. Even when the supplement is telling the truth, though, they probably aren’t giving you the whole story. Weight loss supplements, for example, usually rely on dangerous levels of caffeine to suppress the appetite and speed up the metabolism; everything else thrown in is practically useless and you’re more likely to give yourself a heart attack than actually lose weight. A single dose of Cellucor Super HD weight loss supplement contains 160 mg of caffeine, the equivalent about two cups of coffee, but also combines that with green tea extract, a secondary caffeine provider somewhere in the 250 mg number (this ingredient is included in a proprietary blend so the exact number can’t be known). Unless you’ve been known to rapidly lose weight from drinking lots of coffee, you should probably save your $50–70 for a set of weights and not a 30 day treatment from useless and possibly dangerous pills.
The unfortunate, difficult truth is that there is simply no way of chemically altering your body without first changing the chemical balance and that won’t be done via supplementation. Supplements “supplement” your body’s natural process and if that’s broken or upset then a supplement is no cure. Look at it this way. Consider someone with depression as a cup that can only ever be filled halfway. A cure would be a treatment that allows the cup to be full most of the time and a depressive episode is when the cup is only a quarter filled. A supplement treatment for depression may, under ideal circumstances, help someone reach that baseline half-full state again from a depressive episode, but it will never reach the brim simply because depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain related to dopamine and serotonin production; if the body is manufacturing these chemicals properly, then a supplement will not enable it to do so. If supplements did half the things they claimed, we’d all have perfect sleep, excellent moods, muscular bodies and complete memories.
One reason why this isn’t perhaps more widely known is that the supplement industry, like the oil industry, often pays labs to run studies that show their products in favorable light. These studies, though, are not peer reviewed, properly conducted studies and lack scientific ground. They are usually performed under ideal conditions on small sample groups. One weight loss remedy marketed under the name “Lipozene” and sold primarily through Walmart distribution, even went so far as to say its research claims were “not typical” in the fine print. These types of companies are therefore not simply guilty of lying about the efficacy of their product or the purity of its contents, but also are guilty of scientific misconduct in the process.
In today’s world, people are trying to be healthier than ever and that’s a good thing. Restaurants are more conscious of dietary preference and ingredient origins, doctors are more rigorously prescribing lifestyle changes when needed and new strides in smart technology have enabled the average person to quantify their health in ways they never could have before. But in doing so, people have also misplaced their trust in a product category that is basically useless at best and at worst, could be deadly and doing the exact opposite of what the user was hoping for. At any rate, supplements are money grabs, costing individuals hundreds of dollars per month on a product that is essentially worthless. It’s time for people to realize that this money is better spent elsewhere and where it is actually needed. Weight loss and muscle gain are best achieved with a gym membership and the hard truth is if you suffer from mental disorder, sleep disturbance or some other malaise you should speak to a doctor about it, not a sales rep at GNC. Sometimes, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
