The Diet

he most logical meaning of “dietary supplement” would be something that supplies one or more vital nutrients missing from the diet. Nevertheless, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994—commonly referred to as DSHEA—defines dietary supplement as any product (except tobacco) that includes at least one of the following: a vitamin, a mineral,  an herb or botanical,  an amino acid, a dietary substance “for use to supplement the diet by increasing total dietary intake,” or any concentrate, metabolite, constituent, extract, or mixture of any of the aforesaid ingredients. Herbs, of course, are not consumed for a dietary purpose and often are marketed with therapeutic claims. The supplement industry, which lobbied dynamically for passage of this act, included them in this definition to weaken the FDA’s ability to regulate their marketing. Since DSHEA’s passage, hormones do have also been marketed as “dietary supplements.”

While the Internet is a good place to begin a seek for information about diet supplement warnings, it is important to realize that it is common practice of diet supplement manufacturers to “seed” the Internet with pages that look like they have been written by customers and scientists. Further research discloses that these pages haven’t, in fact, been written by these people. Instead, they are pages created by advertising departments or writers for hire who are instructed to write reviews with a certain ratio of positive to negative reviews. Other common practices of company intended to complicate a genuine warning include:

• False “testimonials” from consumers that are really written by marketers
• Seeding the pages of competitors with bad reviews and negative testimonials
• Taking a report made about a certain element by a respected expert and pulling it out of context or twisting the background in order to make that ingredient appear to be more influential or do something that it doesn’t
• Creating comparison web page that allegedly show a side-by-side comparison of their supplement with others
• Hiring an “independent” investigate firm to run a “study” on their product that searches for a foregone conclusion
• Massaging data from other studies so that it appears to support the efficacy of their product

There is a lot of money sloshing around the diet industry and when you are looking to lose weight every one of these companies is going to part you from a significant amount of your hard earned money.

In short, if you aren’t sure what you’re buying is backed by a real independent study of real scientists, you should be weary of any claims made by the product. As always, buyer beware!