S2 E4: Take With Caution

Hey, dream listeners, there's now an ad-free version of the dream that you can subscribe to, the dream plus at thedream.supercast.com.

Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of this show with zero ads, which you love and I love.

And we're hoping that this will help us pay the bills.

And the main goal being that we can keep making this show.

Go to thedream.supercast.com and subscribe.

To make it easy, we have put the link in the show description.

Just look down underneath this episode.

It says thedream.supercast.com and just click on that easy peasy you're gonna get a lot of extra stuff too we're working on all that another thing you need to do please subscribe to our instagram it's the dream x the letter x jane marie see you over there

ready to elevate your skincare introducing medicate a clinically proven dermatologist recommended british skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Mini Protein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The liquid peptides advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.

Life is unpredictable, but preparing for the unexpected shouldn't be.

Take ownership of your life planning with Policy Genius to help your loved ones have a financial safety net in case case something happens to you.

They offer life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage.

Don't wait for life to make other plans.

Protect your family today.

Head to policygenius.com.

That's policygenius.com.

Previously, on the dream.

Should there be a limit beyond which the product is going to have to be considered an over-the-counter drug instead of a supplement?

So, like, if it's a vitamin C at a level that could be consumed in food, it's one thing.

And if it's vitamin C at a level way beyond that, maybe it's not really a food-like substance anymore.

Maybe now it's a over-the-counter drug.

And that freaked out the nascent supplement industry.

And they managed to get a number of really influential pieces of legislation passed, which basically forbid the FDA from ever setting standards or limits on what vitamin products could contain.

Last episode, we heard from Catherine Price, a science journalist who wrote a book called Vitamania.

Catherine's the woman who convinced Dan, former lover of vitamins and supplements, to throw out all of his pills, tinctures, and powders and rethink the amount of money and energy he was putting into his daily supplement routine.

This was for two reasons.

One, because he couldn't trust that all the ingredients on the label were actually in the supplement he was taking.

And two,

Even if the ingredients were what the manufacturers claim they were, there was almost no chance that studies had been done on each of these products that could explain the efficacy or potential side effects of what he was putting in his body.

That lack of information was a result of a series of legislative wins for the supplement industry that left the FDA, the government agency that's supposed to regulate these products, with very little power to do so.

And it started with a piece of legislation called the Proxmire Amendment that was passed in 1976.

What was the Proxmeier Amendment?

So the Proxmire Amendment was the industry's response to a set of proposed regulations from the FDA that basically said, okay, everything that the FDA is now proposing to regulate, we want them to not be able to do any of those things.

You know what it reminds me of?

What?

H.R.

3409.

Yeah, it does, huh?

It sounds like the anti-pyramid scheme bill that was like, here's the anti-part.

The anti-part is you can't call us a pyramid scheme.

Exactly.

But then boxing it up as something that is some sort of consumer protection.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Just how bad things got under Proxmire and then the weaker and weaker legislation that came afterwards

to the point where supplements actually did kill people in some cases.

Catherine has some more details, and she also has a way we can learn to protect ourselves, which because of this crazy history, we have to.

But yeah, it all started with Proxmire.

The power shift was bad enough that a few years after the Proxmire Amendment passed, the FDA looked at the study they had done from 66 to 73 and the proposed regulations that came out of it and ended up throwing them all out.

And that left them taking a new stance, which was we can look into single companies at a time, but we don't have the bandwidth or the resources and there was no political will to look into the entire industry at once, which is what they were hoping to be able to do with those regulations.

To actually go go to the industry and say, We expect you to live up to certain standards as an entire industry.

So, why were these senators on board here?

Well, some of them did have financial interests, whether they

maybe came from a state that sold a lot of supplements or were a lot were manufactured there or something.

But I think the main thing was they were getting a lot of pressure from the public.

It helps to put the public's concerns in context here.

This was 1976.

We're on the heels of losing the Vietnam War, and a president had resigned because he was found to be a liar and a cheat.

And at that time, anyway, that didn't win you a lot of public support.

People became suspicious of the powers that be.

Some vitamin and supplement manufacturers took advantage of this.

Take, for example, the infamous case of Leotril.

also called vitamin B17, which is not a vitamin at all, but instead a derivative of apricot seeds, that folks have claimed can cure cancer, though all it's ever been found to do is poison people.

Some hucksters, a father and son duo named Ernst Krebs Sr.

and Jr., patented it and sold it as a vitamin to get around FDA testing.

And in the 70s, when enough people got sick, the FDA tried to shut them down.

A years-long battle ensued.

Some John Birchers, the far-right organization, who were tangentially pals with the Krebs, stepped in and argued that the government shouldn't be able to dictate which treatments cancer patients can try.

And as a perk, that also meant that their friends should be able to sell cancer patients whatever baloney they wanted.

They eventually lost, but it's an argument that persists to this day.

Here's Catherine Price again.

The dietary supplement industry had a number of powerful industry groups that had formed, and the basic purpose was to convince the American public that the FDA was trying to take vitamins away.

They were using the word vitamin to refer to all of these products.

So first of all, they're lying about what the FDA is trying to do.

That wasn't true.

They weren't trying to take vitamins away.

Second, they're using the word vitamin to refer to products that were not vitamins.

And third, they argued that any attempt by the FDA to regulate these products would amount to an infringement of Americans' personal freedom.

And as every American knows, we really don't like it when people try to take our freedom away or our personal choice.

Right.

Turns out this was a very effective tactic for the industry, and one they would turn to again 20 years after the Proxmire amendment, when a health crisis triggered a new investigation into the supplement industry.

Yeah, so in the late 1980s, a disease started popping up that had really horrible symptoms.

It was later figured out that the disease was called eosinophilia myalgia syndrome, or EMS.

So this disease started popping up, and it was occurring in people who were taking a dietary supplement that included L-tryptophan.

The The stuff in turkey.

Yeah, the stuff in turkey and a lot of different foods.

I feel like I've heard of L-tryptophan in antidepressant and like anti-anxiety supplements.

Well, that's what it was for.

So L-tryptophan was supposed to help with depression.

Insomnia.

Insomnia.

Like

riffing off of the turkey thing.

Turkey makes you nap.

Yeah.

ADD in children.

That was one of the big claims.

So it's supposed to chill you out.

Yeah.

So what happened with L-tryptophan is that people who had contracted this EMS, they all took L-tryptophan supplements that had been manufactured in this same Japanese manufacturing plant.

Okay.

They thought that it was probably, you know, had something to do with an impurity that was in the plant.

And it did.

It was discovered later that there were over 63 different contaminants found in these particular batches of L-tryptophan.

And the company eventually paid out $2 billion to the victims.

But later,

a professor of neuroscience at both Harvard and MIT testified before Congress that it wasn't just the impurities because what we were doing is we were taking this isolated amino acid, L-tryptophan, that say if it were in Turkey, it would be surrounded by 21 other amino acids and it would be a dietary protein.

But we were just isolating that one amino acid sticking in our bodies in really high amounts.

And let's see what happens.

Right.

What was happening to people?

Well first of all more than 1500 people were affected by the EMS outbreak caused by l-tryptophan and an estimated 40 people died.

There was a woman named Dorothy Wilson who had contracted EMS who described the symptoms she was suffering from during a congressional hearing in 1993.

So she's having painful muscle spasms.

Her white blood cell count was really high.

And doctors were saying that normally it would be caused by a parasitic infection or an allergic reaction or cancer.

Those were the types of things that would bring her white blood cells up that high, and they stayed up that high.

She had trouble moving, including walking or getting up from chairs, or even sitting in chairs.

So she was bedridden.

She was having thyroid problems, pituitary gland problems.

She had a complete pause in her menstrual cycle.

She had a loss of appetite.

She was feeling super weak.

She had extensive nerve damage, bladder weakness, and inability to speak.

Keep in mind that she was still suffering from her symptoms when she testified, but she told Congress that she had a burning desire to be there and that she wanted the members of Congress she was testifying in front of to look at her while she was, quote, condemned to a life of severe pain and disabilities.

It was a pretty serious thing.

I mean, 40 people dying is a big deal.

Yeah, you would think then they would just change the law.

Yeah, well, they did.

They were never actually able to take L-tryptophan L-tryptophan off the market, though.

And in 1998, there was another outbreak from a different form of tryptophan.

But in 1990, Congress went after the health claims on the bottles.

And this is one of the only ways Congress and the FDA has ever been successful in holding these companies responsible.

In this case, they said that because of the health claims on the bottles of L-tryptophan, more people were encouraged to take this supplement, and then subsequently more people were harmed.

Right.

And the bill they came up with in 1990 to regulate the health claims on dietary supplements was called the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act.

And that's what led to the nutritional panels on the back of the.

I remember this.

Yeah.

It reminds me of when fast food places had to start posting calories.

Like there was definitely a lot of people being like, this is really great information.

And then a few people being like, why do we need to know this?

Yeah, I don't want to know this.

I don't want to know this at all.

So when they started debating the NLEA, the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act, there were people that were involved with the industry that really started to push back.

It was very similar to what happened in 1973 with the Proxmire Amendment.

Yeah.

One of those people, and someone whose name will keep coming up in this, is Orrin Hatch.

Yeah.

The senator from Utah.

Yeah.

So like Utah is known as the Silicon Valley of the supplement industry.

You know what's funny is they're also known as the capital of multilevel marketing.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

MLM stands for Mormons Losing Money.

Yeah.

I read that on some meme somewhere, but okay.

So that's the money.

No, it was a really big deal.

I mean, honestly, in the early 90s, supplements were Utah's third largest industry.

a $3 billion industry.

And now it's crazier because now it's the state's largest industry.

The other thing to know is that there's a new head of the FDA at this point.

His name is David Kessler.

So he wanted any claim that the industry made to be backed by significant scientific agreement is what he said.

Whoa.

Yeah.

So that's a big one, right?

I mean, that's like, they don't do that.

you know right there's there certainly isn't significant agreement among scientists that these products do what they say yeah that do anything then everything's kind of exploded because the industry was really freaked out that the new head of the FDA was not on their side.

They fought back, of course.

So here you can really see this pattern start emerging.

The FDA reacts to something that's going on in the public, whether it's recommendations for mega-doses of vitamin C or whether it's a reaction or disease that's triggered by a supplement that they have yet to study.

They propose regulations.

It may end up in front of Congress and the industry fights back because they're unwilling to take part in any regulatory process.

The person who kind of took charge that was leading the industry side was a guy named Gerald Kessler.

No, another Kessler?

Another Kessler.

No, not at all.

That's a question from a mom.

Yeah, I know.

So, David Kessler, FDA.

Yeah.

He's fighting the industry.

DK, FDA.

Yeah.

There's a D in the FDA.

Okay.

And then GK.

Gerald Kessler, industry guy.

Where did he come from?

What is his job?

He was the founder and the owner of Nature's Plus.

They're very much a CVS vitamin I

supplement.

Sounds really familiar.

At the time, they were one of the top 10 supplement manufacturers in the United States.

He saw the NLEA

as being potentially disastrous for the industry, right?

Because they would have to prove that the products did what they were claiming they did.

And that was, so that's what we're talking about here.

The FDA wanted the manufacturers of supplements to prove that the claims they were making about their supplements were true.

And the manufacturers were like, no, we can't do that.

That's going to destroy our industry.

There was another proposed bill.

With this, it would have allowed for district courts to order recalls on any products if there was a violation on the product that included fraud or significant risk to people or animals.

Wait, that isn't a thing?

No, it's not a thing.

So what did the industry do?

What did the GK guy do?

He brought several dozen of the industry's biggest leaders to his lodge for a

war council.

Yeah.

It was probably literally a lodge.

It was.

At this little war council that was held over a weekend in February 1992, the group that was there formed the Nutritional Health Alliance, which would be a gigantic, powerful new lobbying group for the supplement industry.

And their goal was within six months, they wanted to generate a million public letters to Congress.

The other thing that they decide is that they're going to use a very similar tactic to what was used by the industry during the Proxmire amendment, which is to frame this as personal freedom.

Right.

They're taking away your rights.

The government, they're coming into your house, they're opening your cupboards, they're sweeping their arms through all of your vitamin supplement bottles.

And during my interview with Catherine, she lays this out really well.

These dietary supplement industry groups did very smart things.

Like they used all the dietary supplement stores in the country, which obviously had a vested interest in being able to sell more products, as basically little outposts where consumers could come in and sign petitions to Congress, you know, fighting back against the supposed things the FDA was doing.

They would give discounts if you wrote to Congress members.

They would shroud certain areas of the store in black to supposedly show you what was going to happen if the FDA got its way.

My favorite example was this 1993 ad that was put on by a supplement lobbying group that starts with this like black screen and this SWAT team jumping out of the back of a van with scary music.

And they run up the stairs of this mansion and then they confront this man in his bathrobe.

You know, guns are drawn, and the man turns around and it turns out that it's Mel Gibson, and he's got a bottle of vitamins in his hand.

And he says something essentially that is

vitamin C, you know, like in oranges.

Vitamin C, you know, like in oranges.

And then the screen cuts to black.

If you don't want to lose your vitamins, make the FDA stop.

Call the U.S.

Senate and tell them that you want to take your vitamins in peace.

If enough of us do that, it'll work.

And as a result, there were millions of letters, millions that got sent to Congress.

I mean, overwhelming number of letters that got sent to Congress.

I feel so sad for the FDA at the time.

Like, can you imagine working there and being like, oh my God.

Well, yeah, also because it feels like the more you, if you're the FDA at that time, the more you start saying, no, we're going to be firm, we're going to really take this on because we need to, we need to regulate this industry, the more you sound like what they're saying you are.

Right.

Like, you know, this uncontrollable government agency that's trying to take away our basic rights.

And then just like with the Broxmire Amendment, Gerald Kessler and his cohorts and also Oren Hatch in the Senate proposed a new bill.

And it was called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act or Deschea for short.

One of the main things that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act or Deschea was trying to do was really broaden the definition of what was a vitamin and supplement.

Because

under the Proxmire Amendment, they were talking about mostly vitamins at that time.

The supplement industry wasn't as big.

So they wanted it in writing that most of the same things they were asking for in the Proxmire Amendment would now apply to a a whole new set of

products.

And that's one of the things that's so scary about it, because we're not just talking about putting synthetic vitamins into a pill.

We're now talking about all sorts of things.

And the result was that the Deschee, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, passed unanimously and got signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994.

And the supplement industry won.

So the FDA has not been able to seize back much power since the passage of that law, which is really one of the first times we've had that happen in American history where the regulations around a category like foods or drugs or supplements got looser rather than tighter.

And I seriously doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.

There were attempts by John McCain and some other people in Congress, but they all died.

And there's a huge, huge amount of pressure from the supplement industry.

They're very good at lobbying.

So they broadened the definition of vitamins and minerals.

So now it was written into law that it would include herbs, botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, metabolites, metabolites, organ tissues,

and glandulars.

Gross.

Okay, what else?

And then also now supplements could take the form of not just pills, liquids, powders, gel caps, teas, and bars.

And gooze.

And you know what that kind of opened the door for?

Uh-oh.

Monster Energy Drink.

That can now be claimed as a supplement.

Not a food.

Yeah.

The other thing it did was it grandfathered in all of the dietary supplements that had been on the market as of October 5th 1994.

So anything that had been manufactured prior to that was now grandfathered in and required absolutely they didn't even have to tell the FDA who they were, what they were, what it was.

It's like Spanish fly at the party store, man.

A-okay.

Another thing that the bill said is that companies are only required to send the FDA information that indicates why they believe the new ingredients will be safe.

And they only need to do it 75 days prior to the product going to market.

Now it's actually loosened.

Now you don't have to send anything.

You just have to have it on hand that you know

that you like in your own filing cabinet, you need to have a piece of paper that says, this is why our product works.

This is why we believe our product works.

This is from the FDA.

And not a study, just like you saying,

I think this works.

Right.

I guess it would have to be convincing to the FDA if you had gone to court or something like that but no one does so it doesn't matter this is from the fda you are responsible for determining what information provides the basis for your conclusion that's terrifying no one is looking out for you i mean i think the main takeaway from deshea is that really anything can go into these bottles right and all you need to prove that they're safe is a piece of paper that the fda might check one day this inability for the fda to require pre-market testing and then I think because most health officials don't even know what dietary supplements are on the market, all of that made us really vulnerable.

And in 1989 it had some devastating consequences.

Back to school is a time when routines reset, and so does screen time.

With all the pickups, practices, and after-school logistics, kids need a way to stay connected.

But handing them a phone designed for adults with internet access and social media, that's where the real concern begins.

Teens already spend an average of nine hours a day on screens outside of school.

That's basically a full-time job just scrolling.

The U.S.

Surgeon General says that kids who spend more than three hours online daily are twice as likely to experience depression and anxiety.

And most of that time is spent on social media.

It's staggering.

Nearly half of teen girls and a third of boys say social media causes overwhelming stress.

A quarter of teens say it makes them feel worse about their own lives.

Here's the good news.

Gab is doing something no one else is doing.

Their approach, called Tech in Steps, offers safe, age-appropriate phones and watches with no social media, no internet browsers, and GPS tracking built in.

From young kids to teens, each device grows with the child and helps build healthy tech habits.

Bottom line, you don't have to give a kid an adult device.

This school year, give them Gab.

Safe connection, no distractions.

I can't recommend Gab enough.

Use our code to get the best deal on something that gives peace of mind, whether you're a parent, a guardian, or just someone who cares.

Visit gab.com/slash the dream and use the code the dream for a special back-to-school offer.

That's GA G-A-B-B.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicate, a clinically proven dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code PODCAST20 for 20% off your purchase today.

The limits on the FDA to both regulate a supplement prior to it coming to market and to check products for toxicity would have terrible consequences once again in 2013 on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.

Hey everyone, we're back from Supplementing.com.

I'm Chris.

And I'm Bill.

Today we're reviewing a supplement that's very popular right now.

It's a thermogenic fat burner called OxieAlite Pro.

The state is investigating numerous cases of liver failure in young and healthy adults.

With OxieAlite Pro, doctors say the company was forced to change the formula because it caused heart problems.

The new formula came out in May and is now causing liver problems.

Since May, at least 10 cases have been reported in Hawaii.

Three more cases of liver damage linked to the weight loss supplement OxyLite Pro.

The state health department says that brings the total number to 32.

Today, the department confirmed for me, a Pro City Man will likely be number 33.

Doctors say nearly two dozen OxieElite customers have been hospitalized, while two others have received liver transplants and one person has died.

Tests show Tanikuchi's Guchi's liver was failing.

He was a loyal fan of the diet supplement Oxie Elite Pro, buying the bottles both online and from GNC stores.

You only see numbers.

You don't actually see people.

Like this is really happening.

This is for real.

This is really happening to people in Hawaii.

Vanessa Stewart, KHON2 News.

Thank you, Vanessa, and that is my high school classmate.

Get well soon.

The state health officials in Hawaii were caught totally flat-footed.

I mean, they didn't know what OxieElite Pro was.

They tried to contact the FDA, but the FDA didn't know what was going on with Oxie Elite Pro at that time.

So here they are with a lack of blood for transfusions, a lack of livers, which healthy livers are hard to come by, and people who are dying.

And again, that was largely because of a lack of information.

Right.

Not only what was Oxie Elite Pro, what was in it?

What were the ingredients that were causing harm to people?

And they were left scrambling trying to figure out what to do.

The danger isn't just in not knowing what's in a supplement.

There's another thing the FDA doesn't get to do.

Make sure companies list side effects and drug interactions on the label.

There's a great example of that in one of the most popular dietary supplement products, which seems innocuous from its name, St.

John's Wort, which it's an herbal product.

Many people take it for depression.

And what is very well known by supplement makers and the medical profession is that St.

John's wort is active.

It does have an active ingredient.

And that active ingredient means that it interferes with upwards of 50%, 5-0, of prescription drugs on the market.

I thought I knew of the warnings about St.

John's wort because I take regular antidepressants and my doctors are like, please don't take this and St.

John's wort.

But they've never told me that it's contraindicated for other prescriptions, like birth control.

There are stories of like quote-unquote miracle babies where the mother's like, how did I possibly get pregnant?

I was taking birth control religiously.

And it's like, oh, well, because you also were taking St.

John's ward.

Or why did my body reject my kidney transplant when I was taking my anti-rejection drugs?

Oh, because you were on St.

John's Ward.

St.

John's Ward is an obvious one, but there are so many, so many products on the market and you can't even know necessarily what's in the products because in many cases they have so-called proprietary blends that is basically like code terminology for secret because they don't tell you what those proprietary ingredients are.

So how's the doctor possibly supposed to know that?

Like the example I use in my book, which I thought was very funny, but also distressing, was this product called Natural Curves, which had a prominent photo of a woman's cleavage on it and then lots of uses of the word natural, natural, natural, natural.

And then like its purpose was quite clear.

And when I looked at the online reviews for this product, people were saying it did stuff.

Like they were talking about breaking out in pimples like they did when they were in high school.

And they were talking about what it actually did do to their breasts.

And then when they stopped taking it, like they went back to, I don't know, like deflated balloons.

I forgot the terminology.

Nonetheless, they gave it like a four and a half star rating.

But I was like, this is where it gets scary because the best case scenario is that natural curves does not do anything to your body.

But if it is giving you acne, it is doing something to your hormones.

And who knows what else it's doing?

And nobody really knows what's in it because they don't have to, they can hide behind a proprietary ingredient list.

And the average consumer is apparently just not, they're just assuming that because it's in a bottle and it's sold in a store, somebody is a watchdog.

And in the case of dietary supplement products, there are not many watchdogs.

Consumers might want to ask themselves, if a substance is so powerful and so miraculous, then why is it being sold as a dietary supplement?

Why aren't companies pursuing that as an actual medical product they could get paid a lot more for?

And the irony being that it's taken by people often who have distrust in the pharmaceutical industry because they think that there's sketchy things going on there, who think that dietary supplements are quote unquote natural, again, because they're borrowing from vitamins halo, and don't recognize it's multi-billion dollar companies who don't have the same standards or rigor or requirements as the pharmaceutical companies, flawed though the pharmaceutical companies may be, you know, at least they have a much stricter.

Well, they have a drug approval process, takes up to 12 years on average, and it costs billions with a B of dollars.

So even though there can be corruption and even though there can be mistakes, there is a whole system there that has greatly improved the safety and efficacy of America's drug supply.

Here's the disconnect.

Who among us would want complete deregulation of prescription drugs, say?

What about over-the-counter medication?

Cold syrup, ibuprofen, that kind of stuff.

We all find it important, super important, to be able to trust that these products are what they say they are and that the labels have warnings we can heed and that they're basically safe.

None of those precautions have been taken for the pills in the next aisle over.

All of that is left up to us and the stretched pretty thin FDA to figure out after we've taken them.

The FDA does not have enough inspectors to go and inspect manufacturing plants, especially abroad.

This is a huge, huge issue.

We tend to think of a vitamin or supplement manufacturer as a one-stop shop where they're making the raw ingredients and the pills.

That's not the case.

They're the people who package the ingredients into the pills, and they get their raw ingredients from all over the world.

In the case of vitamins, there's no vitamin, basically no vitamin manufacturing plants in the United States itself.

There's a few in Europe, but not many.

Most of them are coming from China and India, places like that.

And in the case of the dietary supplement ingredients like herbals and botanicals, I mean, there can be a very long supply chain there.

Think about all the exotic names of ingredients we see in daily supplements here in the U.S.

Take in my moon juice, for example.

Their dusts contain goji berry and ashwagandha and ginseng and a lot of of ingredients that are grown on the other side of the world.

If there's no one mining the store at any point in the supply chain, that's dangerous.

Take the leaded turmeric story out of Bangladesh this year.

If you mix lead with chromium you get lead chromate and it's a dark yellow pigment that was being used to cut turmeric powder for years.

Some of that powder was being exported and ingested all over the world.

That was a blatant fraud, but speaks to how little we can know about what we're taking.

And then you could have just honest mistakes, like in the case of an herbal product from a plant.

You have to know which plants to gather.

You have to know what season to gather them in, because plants are living things.

They've got different levels of different substances.

You have to know which part of the plant that you should be grinding up or extracting or whatever.

So there's huge problems with these products not having what they say they do.

And there's actually a website I recommend for consumers called consumerlab.com, started by an analytical chemist.

It's a subscription site, but if you're someone who actually is going to keep taking dietary supplements after this, you probably want to consider it, where they actually do pull products off of the shelves and randomly test them, not for safety or for efficacy, but to make sure that they actually contain what they say they contain, that they dissolve in your body in the way that would make them actually not just contribute to, you know, this is the phrase expensive urine and some other quality checks.

And it's amazing to read their reports and see how how often there are issues with overages or underages or substances that shouldn't be in there.

And this is such a problem that there's been letters from the FDA, like open letters to the supplement industry, calling out the industry and saying there's things being found in products like stimulants, antidepressants, anticoagulants, steroids, all sorts of scary stuff that's being found in dietary supplement products.

You think you're buying an herbal thing, like an herbal sexual enhancement product from a Chinese medicine.

If it really works like Viagra, there's a high chance that that actually has Viagra in it.

And I spoke to one analytical chemist who had a great story about that.

He said he'd been hired to analyze some herbal product.

And so he'd broken open a couple of the couple of the capsules to mix it up so that he could analyze what was inside.

And when he opened up one of the capsules, a piece of a Viagra fell out, like an actual piece of a blue pill.

And he was like, well, that one was pretty easy.

And there's also like 70, if not more, analogs of Viagra-like chemicals that do the same thing as Viagra, but they won't show up in exactly the same way if the substances are tested.

So consumers really need to beware, especially as you get into bodybuilding, sexual enhancement, and weight loss products.

Again, to contrast that to the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the onus is on them to prove that their products are safe and effective before they come to market.

And they actually have to do post-market record keeping and analysis to make sure that there's not an unforeseen problem with their drug, which we've seen happen with a number of drugs when they get recalled or they have problems after they're approved by the FDA.

Because once you have millions of people taking them, you start to have side effects that might not have shown up in the smaller clinical trials.

But that's on

company to keep track of and then basically prove itself to the FDA to comply with the FDA versus the FDA with its limited staff being told that it has to somehow ferret out problems from this giant industry and the industry itself doesn't have to really do that much work.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicaid, a clinically proven dermatologist recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The liquid peptides advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicaid.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code PODCAST20 for 20% off your purchase today.

So, I just think it's very dangerous to assume that anyone's looking out for your health or safety when it comes to these products.

One of the interesting things that came out of the 1994 law, Deshea, is that we ended up with what are called structure function claims, which are the little claims basically you see on supplement bottles that say things like improves regularity instead of prevents constipation.

And that's because you can't say it prevents something, but you can say it improves.

And there's always an asterisk and it always says this statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

But I think that everyone on both sides knows that there's many cases in which these products are being taken in the same way you've taken over-the-counter drug, and they're taken as substitutes in many cases for prescription drugs.

Including the labels on moon juice, which say stuff like targets stress and supports stamina, recovery, and a healthy immune system, targets and supports.

These positive attributes are crucial in marketing and selling the product.

But I wish the manufacturer thought that maybe some negative words could be helpful too.

I actually asked a representative from the quote-unquote Council for Responsible Nutrition, which is one of the supplement industry's leading trade groups, industry groups, and I asked the man point blank, like, you know, in the case of St.

John's ward that these side effects are very probable and consequential.

Why don't you feel some kind of moral responsibility?

Like put a warning on the front of St.

John's ward or even on the back that's very specific that says, do not, you know, this is known to interfere with prescription drugs.

So talk to your doctor instead of their generic

these claims that have not been reviewed by the fda and talk to a doctor before you take it without any kind of specificity that would would really make it clear that it's a thing you really need to do and he basically said that's not our responsibility it's the responsibility of doctors to tell you about these potential side effects and it just seemed like a completely you know ducking responsibility and frankly dumb business decision from my perspective because it's like this is why the public doesn't trust the dietary supplement industry and why they shouldn't trust the dietary supplement industry because they are not willing to step up and even point out a very real threat that is probably not recognized by most people.

Medical professionals cannot be expected in the 12 minutes that they have per person who comes in their office to get a thorough history of their dietary supplements and then think to tell them about any possible interaction there might be.

So I I just thought it was a really infuriating to think that there's this giant industry that doesn't really seem very interested in policing itself to get rid of some of the truly sketchy players on the market, which I think is not a smart business decision because it contributes to the erosion of trust in their industry.

Whereas if they really had a strong approach to protecting the quality of the products in the industry, I think that would go a long way towards improving public health and certainly confidence.

Okay, so with all of this, what's the best case scenario for a consumer?

Well, I think the best case scenario is that we're spending billions of dollars a year on substances that don't do anything

or on substances that don't have active ingredients, but the placebo effect makes it so that they do have an effect on our well-being, which is possible.

Our concern should be twofold.

First, that we're wasting our money.

And then second, that we might actually be ingesting products that can harm us.

You can't discount the fact that anytime you take a substance for a positive purpose, you also have the risk that it will do something negative or that it will interfere with some other substance you're taking.

And that's where we are.

The place we're at with supplements is that we don't know.

And Deschea further cemented what was asked for by the industry in the Proxmire Amendment, and now we're in a place where they are protected by law.

They are not required to tell us what is actually in these products.

Or at least they can tell us what's in the products, but they don't have to prove it.

Wellness isn't just about what we're putting in our bodies.

It's also about what's coming out.

Next time on the dream, when those women have to come to the hospital because their labor course is not going the way that they thought,

they're

disempowered and more so than women who are expecting to give birth in a hospital.

They feel feel like they did something wrong.

You know, they surrounded themselves with the wrong person or they weren't in the right mindset.

They go through and dissect every minute of every day for the weeks leading up to their birth and think if they had done one thing differently, it would have changed the outcome.

And it's just not true.

Statistically, that's just not true.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me, Jane Marie, and Dan Gallucci.

Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson, with production by Stephanie Karauki and Lyra Smith.

The Dream is executive produced by me, Dan Gallucci, Peter Clowney, and Chris Bannon.

Our mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns.

Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and thanks for listening.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicate, a clinically proven dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicate is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code Podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.

With a Wealthfront cash account, your uninvested cash earns 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks with free instant withdrawals, even on weekends and holidays.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

Wealthfront, money works better here.

Go to wealthfront.com to start today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokers LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier, no commercials.

Plus, bonus content.

This helps keep us independent.

And your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.

We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us.

We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

That's thedream.superca.com.

Supercast.

Please, please go subscribe.

It's five bucks.

It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles.

See you there.