Dangerous Supplements

According to the August Consumer Reports, article “Dangerous Supplements,” What consumers might not realize, though, is that supplement manufacturers routinely, and legally, sell their products without first having to demonstrate that they are safe and effective. The Food and Drug Administration has not made full use of even the meager authority granted it by the industry--friendly 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). As a result, the supplement marketplace is not as safe as it should be.

Consumer Reports has identified a dozen supplement ingredients that we think consumers should avoid because of health risks, including cardiovascular, liver, and kidney problems. We found products with those ingredients readily available in stores and online.

Working with experts from the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database, an independent research group, we identified a group of ingredients (out of nearly 1,100 in the database) linked to serious adverse events by clinical research or case reports. To come up with our dozen finalists, we also considered factors such as whether the ingredients were effective for their purported uses and how readily available they were to consumers. We then shopped for them online and in stores near our Yonkers, N.Y., headquarters and easily found all of them for sale in June 2010.

The “Dirty Dozen” are
- Aconite
- bitter orange
- chaparral
- colloidal silver
- coltsfoot
- comfrey
- country mallow
- germanium
- greater celandine
- kava
- lobelia,
- yohimbe.