It takes effort to keep up with what healthy supplements might be helpful for you, not to mention the cost. But you’d at least assume what you were getting was the real deal. Turns out, not so much. At least not certain store-brands.
The New York State Attorney General’s office tested store-brand supplements from Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Target and GNC to see what they were really made of. Some supplements didn’t even have the labeled active ingredient at all, some actually contained potential allergens, including wheat and radish powder – even houseplants.
“In a good number of cases there was no organic material in the product. In some cases there was sand,” said Marty Mack, Executive Deputy Attorney General for New York.
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That’s right. Sand.
Cease-and-desist letters were sent to the chain stores from the Office of the Attorney General in order for the sale of products to be shut down.
“The supplements tested included Ginkgo Biloba, St. John’s Wort, Ginseng, Garlic, Echinacea and Saw Palmetto,” part of the letter to GNC reads. “By using established DNA barcoding technology, analytic testing disclosed that 5 out of 6 types of dietary supplement products tested were either unrecognizable or a substance other than what they claimed to be, and therefore constitute contaminated or substituted products.”
Some products were worse than others and same with the stores, but ginkgo biloba and St. John’s Wort could not be found in the products sold with those labels in any of the stores.
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GNC, Wal-Mart and Walgreens supposedly plan to stop selling the supplements just within New York state. Target is perhaps being smarter and will take them off the market nationwide, even though its results were the best of the four. If you could call it best.
The best bet for consumers is to make sure supplements indicate that they are third party regulated on the label, according to Jenn Dazey, a naturopathic doctor with Bastyr University’s Botanical Medicine Department.
Photo from Flickr user Dav Yaginuma]
