Your Supplements are a Lie

(dramatic music) - Imagine you're getting ready to go to the gym, you grab your keys and your bag, and then you take a supplement, and you feel like it's working. It might be working a little too well. What you don't know is that this supplement, one that you bought at the health aisle at your grocery store is laced with an anabolic steroid, an illegal drug invisibly mixed into this powder.

In recent years researchers have been grabbing thousands of different supplements off the shelf, and testing them to see what's inside. And what they found in over 3000 supplements that they tested is that 28% had some sort of illegal substance, mostly steroids, meaning the people that are taking them are unintentionally doping. In another study, 92% of the supplements that were tested by scientists were contaminated with bacteria.

87% had fungal contamination, And when they tested CBD supplements they found that 55% of the oils had either way more or way less CBD than stated on the label. And a few of them even had THC in them, the thing that gets you high. And it turns out the government here in the United States doesn't seem to care.

So how did we get here? And why are shady companies, influencer campaigns and targeted advertisements selling Americans things to put in their body that aren't what they say they are, and that are potentially dangerous? And I guess a big question for me is which of these are actually necessary or healthy?

And which of them are dangerous? And is this all just a waste of money? (gentle music) Hey, pause really quick.

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Okay, that's it. Let's dive in to this story about supplements. (drum bangs) It's easy to look at stuff like this, and say it's kind of like medicine, and so it would be kind of regulated like medicine, tracked and vetted by our government's health agency like medicine is.

But medicine goes through a very different process, a super lengthy process with tons of studies and clinical trials, paperwork. It takes years and years, and a lot of drugs aren't ever even approved. They fail this process, and never make it onto the shelf.

But supplements don't have to do any of that. - Companies are responsible for ensuring their products are safe, and in fact can often put new dietary supplements on the market without even telling FDA. - There are rules on what supplement companies are allowed to put in their pills and gummies, but these rules aren't enforced in any real way.

It's up to the supplement company to obey them. - With dietary supplements it's on the honor system that they are following those rules and regulations. - That's Dr C.

Michael White, - A pharmacist, distinguished professor and chair of pharmacy practice at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy. - And this is Dr F. Perry Wilson.

- I am a physician and researcher here at Yale University. (bell dings) - These two doctors helped us a lot in our reporting, helped us navigate this really complex topic, and helped us better understand how this $50 billion a year industry runs wild with all of these products that make health claims that are often not backed up by anything. There's a wild story on how we got here, and to understand it we have to go back to the 80's and 90's to understand this political commercial featuring Mel Gibson and health supplements.

- It's only vitamins. - [Reporter] Nelson Mandela got a rousing welcome from the city of New York today. - The East German authorities have said the Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore.

- Oh yeah. - The 90's was a time of economic prosperity in America, which fueled the rise of a health conscious middle class that was increasingly attracted to health foods and fitness regimes, and alternative medicine. - I avoid sugar, that makes me feel good about me.

- To cater to this shift, you have this supplement industry, which was very small and niche at the time, but they met the demand of this new middle class and began diversifying their offerings. They expanded beyond the typical vitamin C tablets and echinacea drops, introducing a variety of new substances, each purporting to enhance one's life in unique ways. One of the supplements that gained popularity was called L-Tryptophan.

It was this health food supplement made of amino acids that claimed to help people sleep and lose weight. It sounded healthy enough until doctors found that people who took the stuff were developing blood and muscle disorders. Investigations found that it led to the death of 38 people.

In response to this incident, Congress began drafting laws that would tighten regulation on health supplements. So they drafted this bill. The bill would give more power to the FDA to regulate these companies, to tighten the rules on how supplements were able to be labeled, what claims they could make.

But, as we know, whenever there's a growing industry that's making a lot of money off of selling things and the government comes in and tries to regulate them, they don't just sit back and let it happen. So all the supplement companies got together, they held these emergency meetings, they sent an army of lobbyists to Washington, and they started pouring money on commercials. - Help make sure your child gets a balanced diet with Flintstones.

- And this is where Mel Gibson, the 90's movie star, comes into the story. (gentle music) - [Officer] Freeze. - Hey guys, guys, it's got it's only vitamins.

Vitamin C, you know, like in oranges. - [Narrator] If you don't wanna lose your vitamins, make the FDA stop. - Yeah, they weren't messing around here.

They published books, they sent flyers to people's mailboxes. They produced more commercials, they created petitions to rally Americans around their supplements, and it worked. More and more Americans were taking supplements, and they responded to this potential tightening of regulation, and all of this fear mongering by the lobbyists by writing to Congress, telling the government not to regulate supplements, to let them keep their vitamins.

At the same time, these lobbyists targeted the lawmakers themselves, convincing them to oppose the legislation that was under consideration in Congress, and to actually counter it by passing their own law, a law that would be friendly to the industry. And you can actually see this point blank. Sometimes lobbying is foggy, and we don't know what happened, but in this case the senators who received the most money from the industry were the ones who actually drafted the new bill for this law.

And here it is. Public law 103-417 from October 25, 1994. So what started as an attempt to regulate supplements actually turned into a law that is friendly to the industry, and the reason we have this.

(dramatic music) I mean I love when you're neck deep in one of these laws, and you just see a statement that just makes it so clear who was influencing this law. Check this out. This law just straight up says that the federal government should not take any actions to impose unreasonable regulatory barriers towards this industry.

And especially, says the law, this industry is really lucrative. It has annual sales of $4 billion. Congress wouldn't wanna slow that down.

So then the big kicker here, one of the key parts of the law is that they specify that supplements, the thing in this bottle is not classified as medicine, it's classified as food. That's how the FDA should treat it, as food. But supplements are not food in the same way a bag of Doritos is food, they're much more complicated.

But we'll get back to that in a sec. The point is that this law gave the industry a lot of freedom, including what kind of claims they could make. The law gave them the authority to say a lot of things about what their health supplement does for people as long as they include this one disclaimer.

I'm looking at Genius Mushrooms. The product says that it is healthy immune system support, energy and clarity. Sounds great.

But then here on the back in very, very, very small, teeny tiny, almost illegible font, zoom in here, you will see a teeny tiny statement that complies with the law. These statements have not been evaluated by the food administrator. This product is not intended to diagnose.

It's right there in the fine print that no one is reading. What people are reading is this. Healthy immune system support, energy and clarity.

I mean, the law is so friendly to the industry. It allows these companies to effectively regulate themselves. The law makes it clear that it's the government's job to go prove that something is adulterated or wrong rather than making the companies prove that their products are safe before they go to market.

I mean it's totally backwards. - We do not approve them for safety and effectiveness before they are sold. Companies are responsible for ensuring their products are safe.

- So thanks to this 1994 law supplement makers were very happy because now they don't have to tell the FDA anything. They don't have to prove that their claims are effective, they just have to put a little tiny fine print disclaimer. And the FDA has no real enforcement regime.

They only really step in in a big way after the supplement is proven to be hurting people. Any authority they do have to check on the supplements has to be done with their shoestring budget. This was Congress giving the supplement industry a blank check, telling them they can do what you want, we can't regulate you, it's now the law.

And this is why the industry went from a $4 billion industry in the early 90's to a $53 billion industry today. This is why Americans are now inundated with capsules and pills and drops and creams and teas that claim to make your body work better. But this is confusing because supplements actually do have a place in our lives for certain people who need certain things that their body can't make.

So one of my questions going into all of this is what of this is legit? Is any of it, or is it all just snake oil? What does the science actually say?

(gentle music) There's been a lot of good study on this, and luckily we got one of those amazing things where they do a study of all of the studies, and they put it all together, and they say "This is what all the studies "have concluded over the years. " Like a good old meta-analysis. This meta-analysis, which used 84 studies, and put it all together to find conclusions, found that vitamins and supplements were generally, quote, associated with little or no benefit in preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease and death.

It had a little bit of a benefit on treating cancer if you already have it. They also found that people with a high risk of lung cancer had a, quote, increased risk of lung cancer and other harmful outcomes by taking one vitamin, betacarotene. So what this basically is saying is that vitamins don't work for the big things, preventing the killers like cancer and heart problems.

And they maybe even hurt us in some cases, depending on the supplement. But in reading these conclusions you start to realize just how complex this is. There are like thousands of different supplements, and there are innumerable numbers of individual bodies that have different chemistry and different experiences.

It starts to get confusing to find a satisfying conclusion. So we asked our experts do supplements actually make us healthier in any way? - Many doctors would suggest that you don't need to take supplements at all, unless you have a deficiency.

- Ah deficiency, that's the key word here. So maybe my body doesn't naturally produce enough vitamin C or I don't get it in my food, then a supplement would be useful. - If you're a strict vegan, you have very strong dietary restrictions for whatever reason, those people probably are good candidates for taking a multivitamin.

- That's a situation where it makes a lot of sense. But most of us don't need to do that. Whenever there's a situation where all the humans in a society need a certain substance that they're not getting, the government goes wild to make it happen.

Like there was a time when we all were deficient in iodine, so to fix this the government worked with salt makers to just put iodine in salt. So now all of us use it all the time, and we just have enough iodine because there's iodine in all of our salt. I guess what I'm saying here is that most of us check off all of our vitamins and mineral needs by living and eating a variety of foods.

But, of course, within our population there are people who can't produce enough of a certain vitamin, or like this YouTuber who just ate chicken tenders every single day. I mean they should probably take some vitamins. You have to eat a variety of foods to get all your vitamins and minerals.

And luckily here in the 21st century we have a test to find out how you're doing on this. It's a blood test. They take your blood, they test it, and they find out how you're doing on vitamins and minerals, and what you might be deficient in, and thus what supplements might actually work for you.

And yet 252 million Americans are popping $53 billion worth of supplements every year, and most of them probably don't need to be taking anything. Okay, so if I don't need all this, but I'm taking a fistful of vitamins every day, where does it all go? - You're just peeing out all of the excess.

And it might give you glow in the dark urine, which is pretty cool, but it's a large waste of your dollars. - Here's a full disclosure that may be surprising to you. I take vitamins and supplements sometimes.

I got sent this green powder from a sponsor who's thinking about sponsoring a video on the channel, and I totally drank it every day. It's a vitamin supplement. It has a billion different vitamins in it.

And I was like "Maybe I need one of these "even though my blood test doesn't say I do, "what if I actually do? "What if it's actually gonna help? " And I tell you that to let you know that this isn't easy.

This is not an easy thing to navigate. We were hit with all of these messages of improve your mental clarity, increased energy. And you're just like "Is any of this real?

" What I'm finding is that most of it is not. But what to me is ethically wrong is when people turn to supplements because they've been lied to or because they don't trust or can't afford other forms of treatment. In other words, when they're desperate.

- Surveys of American sentiment show that pharmaceutical companies have lower approval ratings than Congress, which is, that's pretty bad. And, again, in many ways rightly so. The profiteering off medications is, in my opinion, quite unethical.

- So we hate pharmaceutical companies for good reason, maybe, but we suddenly trust supplement companies? We trust vitamins, and the industry that makes them? Okay, so just quick recap.

Supplements are the wild west in the United States. They've been very poorly regulated. The industry's gone wild.

They can make these wild claims. And a lot of us are maybe wasting our money, and peeing out supplements that we don't need. Is that the scope of the problem here, just that we're wasting our money and we're being falsely advertised to?

Doesn't seem that bad. (dramatic music) That is until you realize that not all supplements are harmless. The law says that supplements should be regulated like food, but they aren't food.

There's a lot of complicated work that goes into creating a high quality, safe supplement. It's a complex process of manufacturing, making sure that the substances are pure, the dosage is correct, and it can go wrong very easily. - 23,000 people a year, in fact, go to the emergency room after taking a supplement.

- Supplement makers don't have to prove that their products are safe. - It was unbelievable what we found. - [Reporter] False and unsubstantiated claims.

- Remember L-Tryptophan back in the 80's people were taking it, and they were thinking it was gonna help with their insomnia and helping them lose weight, and yet it caused thousands of illnesses and dozens of deaths. One of the big problems with that was likely due to contamination within the supplement, not necessarily the substance itself. A few years ago there was a supplement that came out that was supposed to regulate blood circulation, but it ended up having lead in it.

It caused all sorts of lead poisoning, and two deaths. A few years later, the FDA seized 300,000 dietary supplements because they had an excessive amount of lead in them. That was from one corporation.

The FDA isn't monitoring all of these supplements, but luckily scientists are. There's this 2018 study that found that 92% of the supplements that they studied had bacterial contamination, and 87% had fungal contamination, which can be really damaging for your body. I'm not gonna go down a whole literature review here because there's so much of this.

Let's just say there's a lot of instances of supplements being found to be contaminated. (dramatic music) Okay, let me just tell you one more example here that is just such a good example of the abuse of the lack of regulation here. There's this one plant called Kratom.

I don't know, here in the US I like feel like I see it everywhere, in every strip mall. It's like Kratom Signs. It's made from this evergreen tree leaf, and it's sold in the form of powder and pills and extracts.

It sounds totally natural and fresh, and I can see why it's doing so well on the market. But, once again, Kratom has been linked to hundreds of cases of salmonella poisoning, and there's the fact that it's highly addictive, especially to those who have had opioid addictions, which is, if you haven't heard, a giant problem in our country. It has been deemed to be the cause of death for 91 people who had overdoses in 2016 and 2017, though only seven of those people were found to only have kratom in their body.

There were other drugs in the overdose as well. But what we're saying here is that this can be dangerous stuff. It's not just food like the law wants it to be.

The FDA urged the DEA to classify this as a schedule one drug, which is the classification for heroin, but it's a dietary supplement just down the road at the local convenience store. Speaking of drugs, some supplements are kind of just like drugs in disguise. - So what we're really seeing is that in a lot of those cases they're putting in synthetic drugs, which sometimes are prescription drugs, and sometimes are products that are not approved by the FDA.

- One study found that over the last decade more than 750 supplements were illegally spiked with drugs. Only half of them were ever recalled. Wait, why can they do this?

Why can they just put drugs, illegal drugs, into supplements? Ah, because of this law. This law that the industry helped pass in the 90's that says that none of this has to get any approval from the FDA.

The FDA only steps in when something goes wrong, when the damage is already done. So backwards. And these companies can get pretty aggressive.

A few years ago, the academics who revealed that these supplement companies were spiking their supplements with illegal drugs got sued by one of these companies, a company called High-Tech Pharmaceuticals. The company ended up losing the lawsuit, but what it revealed is that this company had been selling a product that they had been ordered to stop selling, to recall, and they just never did. There's so little oversight happening here.

And, again, it's a giant industry, with a lot of money and a lot of products, and it's an FDA that is very small, with very little money, and not a lot of authority to do much. And as we mentioned at the very beginning of the video, when researchers went in and just popped open some of these bottles and studied the pills, they found that a lot of these supplements don't actually have what they say they have. They're a totally different substance, but none of us know because you don't know what calcium tastes like.

- Literally there have been studies that have shown some supplements have no detectable amount of the thing that it says is supposed to be in there. - No detectable amount. And then we've got good old melatonin.

I love melatonin when I need it. That gummy that helps us all get a good night's sleep. But it's not a sleeping pill, right?

Because it's like natural. - [Reporter] Melatonin poisonings in children have been on the rise over the past decade. - Well actually melatonin is not a vitamin, it is a hormone that you naturally produce.

It helps induce sleep. And it's kind of been trending over the last few years, especially among children. Over the past decade, the number of children who have overdosed on melatonin went up 530%, causing kids to experience symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea.

A lot of that is because of dosage problems. In some cases they found that the dose is 50% higher than what was on the label. - [Reporter] The US Food and Drg Administration doesn't have any control of the ingredients or the accuracy of dosage claims.

- We talked to one guy who started a Reddit forum because he was taking Lions Mane, which is a mushroom supplement, and it was causing a mysterious illness. He thought it was going to give him energy and mental clarity like it says on the bottle, but instead what he experienced was heart palpitations, sleepless nights. - I couldn't sleep for eight months straight.

By that I say one more than one or two hours a night. - When he started the subreddit, he found thousands of others who reported a whole host of neurological issues, chronic tension headaches, a lack of emotion. One user's husband took his life after not being able to sleep, having constant panic attacks, and losing his job over it.

He was 43. - I'd been to the hospital about 20 times the first two months. I have seen basically every specialist that I could get ahold of, and really nobody could tell me what was going on.

- These people come to Reddit because they don't have any answers. They bought a supplement that looked legitimate, promising mental clarity, and focus and energy, and had their lives completely changed. That's because our government failed.

We have a government to protect us against exactly these types of things. But instead people are turning to Reddit to find answers. To me this is the most atrocious version of supplements.

We actually reached out to the FDA as a part of this story to understand what's the deal? Why is it like this? And they responded, and we scheduled an interview.

We were gonna discuss dietary supplements and regulation in the United States, but then the day before the interview they canceled our meeting, and then just ghosted us. Luckily we have clips of former FDA commissioners talking about this, and they all seem to agree that this is a problem of authority and resources. - Will the FDA ever regulate this industry?

- We tried. (gentle music) - So, what can be done here? Well, luckily we live in a system where we can make change by changing laws.

Like in the 90's we almost did this. If the Congress had given the FDA more power we would have stricter punishments for supplement companies who break the rules. We would have better rules around what they can sell, and what claims they can make.

- We should at least be able to agree that all the companies should have to prove that they don't have bacterial or fungal contamination, that they don't have heavy metals, that they're not containing prescription drugs, and that they do contain the product in the dose that's specified in the pills that they're putting on their label. - I would like purity, and that people know what they're getting. I mean we owe it to consumers at the very least that if you're gonna choose to buy it you should at least know what you're getting.

That seems like the bare minimum, and right now that's not the case. - The experts we talked to don't think that supplements should be regulated like drugs. I think that makes sense.

But they agree that we should start with giving the FDA the authority and the resources it needs to monitor supplements so we know what's actually in them, so that we're not trusting the honor system of for-profit companies to obey the rules, and to actually put in these supplements what they say is in these supplements. This would mean the FDA going and conducting spot checks more often and more aggressively to make sure that this stuff is correct, and that it's being manufactured in a clean way, free of contamination. Congress has recently considered a bill that would help with this, including trying to create a database of all the supplements so that the FDA at least knows what's on the market.

But, of course, the supplement lobby's not gonna stand back. They spend over $2 million a year on lobbying, making sure that things stay the way they are. They make a lot of money off it.

So, if you are one of the many millions who take a bunch of supplements, and are not sure if they're spiked with weird stuff, or if you even need them, what do you do? And the answer is go get your blood tested, and just see if you're deficient in anything, if you actually need a dietary supplement. And even if your blood test comes back and you don't need anything, I believe that people should be able to consume whatever they want, even if it's not scientifically proven.

You know your body, you should be able to take whatever vitamin or mineral you feel is working for you. I just think that when you have a for-profit industry that is free to mislead and deceive and prey on consumers, you get a bunch of bad situations like the ones we've talked about here. So until the government steps in to help us navigate this, we're kind of on our own.

I'm gonna put some links in the description to third party websites that you can go to to look up your supplements, the specific supplements, and see if they've passed a high quality standard to know if at least you're getting what it says on the bottle. So that's where we're at with supplements. We're here waiting for transparency and accountability, and above all waiting for the regard of others' wellbeing over the interests of an industry that seems to care more about profit than about our health.

(gentle music) Thanks for watching the video everyone. Thank you CoPilot for sponsoring today's video. CoPilot found that people are nine times more likely to stick with a workout routine if they're actually accountable to a human being that checks in with me, that asks me how it's going.

That makes all of the difference. There's a link in my description, it gets you 14 days for free with your own personal health and fitness coach. So you can try it out for free, see if it works, and cancel if it doesn't work, and stick with it if it does.

Thanks to all of our supporters over at The Newsroom, which is our Patreon. I deeply appreciate your support every month. For those who want to learn more, there's a link in the description.

We sell LUTs and presets, which is how we color our videos and photos. I have a poster that is a bunch of maps that's really fun, and we started a new channel called Search Party with my old colleague Sam Ellis, and it's really good. That's all, thanks for being here.

See ya.