Consumer Reports Article Support FDA's Attempt To Regulate or Outlaw All Nutritional Supplements

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The cover of the May, 2004 Consumer Reports magazine blares in bold type: "Dangerous Supplements!" Inside, readers are taken on a tour of what can only be called "FDA approved propaganda" about prescription drugs, herbs and consumer safety. The emphasis of the article is that people are being harmed by dangerous herbs while pharmaceuticals are certified as safe and well tested.

The article makes absolutely no mention of the 100,000 deaths and more than two million injuries caused by prescription drugs each year. There's no call to action for the FDA to ban these dangerous drugs, no mention of the 40,000 additional deaths caused by over-the-counter pain relief medications each year, and of course no mention of the FDA's full approval of highly toxic, disease-causing food ingredients like aspartame (which accounts for nearly 75% of all food ingredient side effect complaints to the FDA) and sodium nitrite (proven to cause brain cancer and leukemia, yet it's added to virtually all packaged meat products found in every grocery store).

In fact, Consumer Reports has chosen to use its considerable influence to unjustifiably scare the public into thinking nutritional supplements are somehow more dangerous than drugs. It does this by naming 12 nutritional supplements "dangerous." The list includes herbs that have been safely used by literally millions of people around the world for centuries, if not thousands of years. Many of these herbs are well known to be perfectly safe: kava, bitter orange, lobelia and yohimbe all have a long track record of safe, effective use with very few side effects. Compared to prescription drugs, in fact, medicinal herbs used in their natural form by everyday consumers have virtually no negative side effects.

Case in point: At least 100,000 deaths are caused each year in the United States by prescription drugs, even according to the American Medical Association's own research. Yet the consumption of nutritional supplements can't even be linked to a hundred deaths each year in the United States. Just do the math: prescription drugs are a thousand times more deadly than nutritional supplements.

The second major distortion of this Consumer Reports article is that drugs are safe because, "...they must be proved effective, with an acceptable safety profile... by means of lab research and rigorous health clinical trials involving a minimum of several thousand people..." This statement is simply false. Prescription drugs are routinely approved by the FDA even while showing disastrous health side effects. Clinical trials are frequently distorted or fraudulently conducted to discard negative results and emphasize positive results. For example, if 100 people participate in a drug trial and 10 people start to show liver toxicity in phase 1, the company running the trial will often simply "disqualify" the 10 people, and later publish the results of the remaining 90 people, claiming "no toxicity was found." The distortion of drug trials is rampant in the industry.

Worse yet, many drugs are now being approved through "Fast Track" programs that allow tests to be conducted on relatively few subjects (a few dozen people, sometimes, not "thousands") for relatively short periods of time that could not possibly reveal underlying health programs. In reality, the FDA drug approval process is so highly corrupt and subject to political and financial influence that it fails miserably at guaranteeing the safety of "approved" drugs. The result speak for themselves: prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death in the United States!

A paragraph from the Consumer Reports article actually contradicts the article's primary supposition that drugs are inherently safe. It says, "By law, drug companies are required to tell the FDA about any reports of product-related adverse events that they receive from any source. Almost every year, drugs are removed from the market based on safety risks that first surfaced in those reports." If those drugs were "proven safe" in massive long-term clinical trials in the first place, then why are they turning out to be so toxic when prescribed to patients? The answer is that the clinical trials are untrustworthy in the first place, and the FDA knowingly approves drugs with highly toxic side effects.

And even when the FDA is made aware of serious problems with prescription drugs, the agency actively works to bury the bad news and allow those drugs to continue to be sold for years, generating enormous profits at the expense of public health. One such drug, Rezulin, was widely prescribed to diabetic patients until it was found to exhibit severe liver toxicity. The FDA was made aware of Rezulin's liver damaging effects as early as 1997, but the drug wasn't pulled off the market until 2000, and only then after repeated calls by industry watchdogs like Public Citizen and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Meanwhile, 10,000 people reportedly died from complications and side effects related to Rezulin. As many as 100,000 people were injured but managed to continue living. This Consumer Reports article makes no mention of Rezulin, whose fatalities dwarf the handful of deaths that have been linked to nutritional supplements like ephedra, which the FDA hastily (and illegally) banned in April, 2004 even with no strong evidence that the herb posed any sort of widespread health risk to the general public.

Clearly, this Consumer Reports article leaves a lot out of the big picture. It doesn't mention the Ritalin drug scam that dopes up tens of millions of children on narcotics, the FDA's burying of test results that link antidepressant drugs to suicides in adolescents (it has just surfaced that the FDA was aware of these studies five years ago but chose to suppress them), nor the risk of heart disease from taking Hormone Replacement Therapy drugs. The list goes on...

In fact, the Consumer Reports article does readers a great disservice by shifting attention away from the real threat to consumer health (prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals) and putting the spotlight on nutritional supplements which have proven to be far safer than prescription drugs. The real story here is that Consumer Reports seems to be promoting a call for stronger regulation of nutritional supplements. The article reads as though it were written by FDA bureaucrats who want to create a "scare story" to justify their continued attempts to regulate all nutritional supplements and, ultimately, outlaw (or regulate out of existence) all vitamins, minerals and herbs, forcing all citizens to depend entirely on prescription drugs that are controlled by a monopolistic industry engaged in outrageous price markups of 15,000% or more (that's not a typo) for their drugs.

The FDA / pharmaceutical racket is a scandal of unprecedented size and significance, and with this article, Consumer Reports supports the continued oppression of natural health and freedom of consumer choice in nutritional supplements. The FDA's own goals of oppression and control go far beyond this, of course, and they include outlawing all prescription drugs from Canada (to force U.S. consumers to purchase from U.S. controlled monopoly drug makers), and generally discrediting all health products and information found on the Internet.

If you want the real story on what's killing people, read Death By Medicine, which explores the astounding fatalities and injuries caused by prescription drugs and FDA-approved Western medic

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