Dietary Supplements: Defective Products, Defective Standards

摘要

Lately, the biggest topic in the herbal medicine/ dietary supplement arena seems to be the quality of supplements sold on store shelves. This has been an issue of concern and sometimes quite heated debate for a long time, but the flames were fanned in February 2015. The New York Attorney General's office sent "cease and desist" letters to several major retailers that were selling dietary supplements, based on a study showing that a majority of the supplements did not contain what they were labeled as containing.1 This was no surprise to most pharmacists and other health care practitioners. Problems with quality in the supplement industry have existed as long as the industry, back beyond the snake-oil salesmen in the old West to the times when one could purchase bones of saints or magical amulets to ward off cholera-causing demons. But the result raised quite a few eyebrows because, if we are going to rely on science, then the science needs to be accurate and as clear-cut as possible; and many practitioners and researchers had serious questions about the appropriateness of the sole identification test used in the study - DNA barcoding.