Last night, March 18th 2012, I was channel surfing and came across a Dateline story with Chris Hansen of "To Catch a Predator" fame that looked into the dangers of the dietary supplement market. They discussed many of the issues that I have been presenting at coaches' education lectures for many years. Dateline was investigating one product that was purchased at a nationwide retailer that was making several people very ill. The interesting part is that they even went one step further.
By now, it should be widely understood by the U.S. consumer that the supplement market is highly unregulated and there is little the FDA can do to stop bogus or dangerous products from reaching the market. What the Dateline investigation exposed was that the problem may be even more widespread than most of us originally feared. Since the FDA does not have the authority to regulate the supplement market before products reach the shelves, the work is left up to private labs to authenticate the products. Dateline investigated and exposed one of these private labs for their questionable testing standards. The process was referred to as "rubber stamping" products. This was made clear when the lab in question missed the obvious poisons that Dateline secretly added to their bogus products. The lab in question tried to place the blame back on the Dateline crew for "falsifying their product research" despite the fact that all the other labs that Dateline gave product to for testing found the poisons and warned against selling the product.
This investigation clearly shows that the labels on the containers don't always accurately describe what is in a product and need to be researched well before a dietary supplement product is consumed. This completely validates the warnings that I have been giving for many years in the seminars for high school coaches.
The most disturbing part is that the commercially available supplement that Dateline was investigating was found at a store that works hard at projecting a strong, safe image. The retail outlet outlet, in their defense, pulled the product from their shelves quickly after the problem was discovered. However, if this retailer was truly looking out for their reputation and best interests, they would be demanding that suppliers of the products that they sell work with specified labs that are of high reputation and avoid certifying their products using labs with questionable methods.
