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Tag: vitamins

  • How To Find Trustworthy Supplements on Amazon

    How To Find Trustworthy Supplements on Amazon

    One of the largest businesses in the world, Amazon, makes up 77% of all supplement sales online. This percent is larger than the five biggest vitamin sellers combined. However, since many are controlled by third-parties, online supplement legitimacy has grown controversial.

    The history of the mismarketed supplement on Amazon is long-lived. Hundreds of articles began emerging about fake products as early as 2013. In June 2020, NPR discovered over 100 dietary supplements illegally marketed as antiviral medications.

    Mismarketed supplements come in a variety of forms, including those that:

    • Wrongfully record doses of active ingredients.
    • Include unlisted ingredients or ingredients by the wrong name.
    • Lack of at least one major active ingredient.

    The most commonly mislabeled supplements on Amazon range from bodybuilding supplements and CBD products to herbal and dietary vitamins. The goal of supplements is usually to augment or increase heath relative to personal goals, but poorly manufactured supplements often produce adverse, even dangerous effects.

    Nearly 5,500 health incidents were reported to the US Poison Control Center over the past year. Vitamins have been known to negatively affect vital organs such as the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder. Worse, overdoses and other forms of supplement poisoning have increased by 35% in less than 25 years. The issues associated with vitamin and supplement use are only increasing, and the industry is not slowing down.

    The supplement and vitamin market is one of the most thriving industries worldwide. It is projected that the global market for dietary supplements will surpass $27 billion dollars by 2027. It is safe to assume that the market for supplements — whether they are high quality or not — will only continue to grow over time.

    From a business point of view, controlling the 58% of third party vitamin sellers on Amazon’s platform is tricky. Many dishonest businesses are familiar with loopholes in the legal and digital business systems, leading to exploits that include:

    • Reselling supplements that were not approved through quality control.
    • Falsely claiming to be located inside of the US to avoid consequences.
    • Paid for reviews that claim a poor quality supplement is safe for human use.

    Tricky business practices make it extraordinarily difficult to purchase safe supplement products through Amazon. This revelation pushed the company to take action, although not as quickly as most had hoped.

    Amazon’s Project Zero launched in 2019 in order to combat false advertising and poor business practices listing supplements online. The program utilizes a program that crawls Amazon search listings to identify suspicious, fake, or dangerous products. Unfortunately, the program requires opting-in by small businesses, reducing reach and identification capabilities.

    A year later in 2020, Amazon debuted a pilot program to vet new businesses on a live basis. It is hoped that the program will identify poor quality supplements before they hit the market, but the full extent of the program has not yet been tested.

    Until better circumstances surround the Amazon supplement industry, it will be important to choose only verified, safe sellers. Look for supplements that follow USDA regulations, possess signs of high quality, and are free from red flags. Until then, this infographic may give further insights.

  • Vitamin D Not As Beneficial As Once Thought

    Many people swear by vitamins and take them every day. Others only take them when they feel like they need to or are looking for certain benefits. Although vitamins have been labeled as beneficial for years, a new study shows that Vitamin D may not have any benefits.

    Vitamin D is said to help protect against bone problems, stroke, cancer and other diseases. Nearly 50% of Americans take Vitamin D, believing it will protect them from these health problems.

    According to Dr. Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, this is not the case.

    “The take-away message is that there is little justification currently for prescribing vitamin D to prevent heart attack, stroke, cancer, or fractures in otherwise-healthy people living in the community,” Dr. Bolland said.

    In the past, doctors have said that Vitamin D deficiencies can lead to poor health and causes bones to lose calcium. The study shows that Vitamin D deficiencies do not cause poor health, but are a consequence of it instead.

    Further studies show unborn babies do not get any benefits from the vitamin when taken by pregnant women. The study shows that people suffering from Vitamin D deficiency would benefit more by walking out in the sun, which causes the body to produce the vitamin naturally.

    Do you think Vitamin D supplements are beneficial?

    Image via Wikimedia Commons.

  • New Study to Examine Vitamin D, Diabetes Prevention Link

    The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced that a new clinical trial to research vitamin D’s role in diabetes prevention has begun. The “large-scale” study, nicknamed D2d, will look at around 2,500 people over the age of 30 with prediabetes. Researchers hope to determine whether vitamin D can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes in such patients.

    “This study aims to definitively answer the question: Can vitamin D reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes?” said Dr. Myrlene Staten, a project officer on the new study at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). “Vitamin D use has risen sharply in the U.S. in the last 15 years, since it has been suggested as a remedy for a variety of conditions, including prevention of type 2 diabetes. But we need rigorous testing to determine if vitamin D will help prevent diabetes. That’s what D2d will do.”

    The study will give half of study participants a 4,000 IU dose of vitamin D daily – five times the 600 IU to 800 IU intake the NIH says adults typically receive. The other half of study participants will receive a placebo. The NIH is currently seeking participants to volunteer in the D2d study.

    According to NIDDK Director Dr. Griffin Rodgers, almost 26 million Americans have diabetes (including Tom Hanks), and around 79 million more have prediabetes. Rodgers and his colleagues believe, based on previous studies, that vitamin D could reduce the risk of developing diabetes by as much as 25%.

    “Past observational studies have suggested that higher levels of vitamin D may be beneficial in preventing type 2 diabetes, but until this large, randomized and controlled clinical trial is complete, we won’t know if taking vitamin D supplements lowers the risk of diabetes,” said Dr. Anastassios Pittas, principal investigator on the new study and a professor of medicine at Tufts University.

  • Stroke Risk Cut by Vitamin B, Shows Study

    Stroke Risk Cut by Vitamin B, Shows Study

    A new study published recently in the journal Neurology has shown that vitamin B supplements could help cut the risk of stroke. The study found that vitamin B could lower the risk of stroke by up to 7%, though several factors could affect outcomes for individual patients.

    “Based on our results, the ability of vitamin B to reduce stroke risk may be influenced by a number of other factors such as the body’s absorption rate, the amount of folic acid or vitamin B12 concentration in the blood, and whether a person has kidney disease or high blood pressure,” said Xu Yuming a co-author of the study and researcher at Zhengzhou University.

    Yuming and his colleagues looked at 14 different clinical trials covering nearly 55,000 patients. All of the studies showed some benefit to stroke risk by taking vitamin b.

    Though the study found a reduction in stroke risk, it did not find a similar correlation for reducing the severity of strokes that do occur or the risk of deth from them. The results also contradict some previous studies, many of which have found conflicting data on whether vitamin B is good for overall heart health.

    “Previous studies have conflicting findings regarding the use of vitamin B supplements and stroke or heart attack,” said Yuming. “Some studies have even suggested that the supplements may increase the risk of these events.”

  • Multivitamins, Blueberries Could Complicate Late-Stage Cancer Treatment

    Multivitamins, Blueberries Could Complicate Late-Stage Cancer Treatment

    Noble Prize recipient James Watson this month published a proposal stating that antioxidants, such as those found in blueberries or multivitamin supplements, could actually promote late-stage cancer progression. The paper, published in the journal Open Biology, is considered by Watson to be “among my most important work since the double helix.” Watson and his colleague Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.

    Watson believes that oxidants and antioxidants could play a role in currently incurable cancers. From the paper:

    For as long as I have been focused on the understanding and curing of cancer (I taught a course on Cancer at Harvard in the autumn of 1959), well-intentioned individuals have been consuming antioxidative nutritional supplements as cancer preventatives if not actual therapies. The past, most prominent scientific proponent of their value was the great Caltech chemist, Linus Pauling, who near the end of his illustrious career wrote a book with Ewan Cameron in 1979, Cancer and Vitamin C, about vitamin C’s great potential as an anti-cancer agent [52]. At the time of his death from prostate cancer in 1994, at the age of 93, Linus was taking 12 g of vitamin C every day. In light of the recent data strongly hinting that much of late-stage cancer’s untreatability may arise from its possession of too many antioxidants, the time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

    All in all, the by now vast number of nutritional intervention trials using the antioxidants β-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium have shown no obvious effectiveness in preventing gastrointestinal cancer nor in lengthening mortality [53]. In fact, they seem to slightly shorten the lives of those who take them. Future data may, in fact, show that antioxidant use, particularly that of vitamin E, leads to a small number of cancers that would not have come into existence but for antioxidant supplementation. Blueberries best be eaten because they taste good, not because their consumption will lead to less cancer.

    Watson proposes that the cell-killing ability of some anti-cancer treatments is due to the action of a group of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS). If ROS induce cell death, Watson claims, it could explain why chemotherapy-resistant cancers also become resistant to radiation treatments.

  • Insulin Release-Improving Vitamin D Could Prevent Clogged Arteries in Diabetics

    A new study shows that diabetics who get an adequate amount of vitamin D are less likely to have their blood vessels clog. Those who do not get enough vitamin D, however, have immune cells bind to blood vessels near the heart, trapping cholesterol and blocking blood vessels.

    “About 26 million Americans now have type 2 diabetes,” said Dr. Carlos Bernal-Mizrachi, co-author of the study and assistant professor of cell biology and physiology at the Washington University School of Medicine. “And as obesity rates rise, we expect even more people will develop diabetes. Those patients are more likely to experience heart problems due to an increase in vascular inflammation, so we have been investigating why this occurs.”

    Bernal-Mizrachi had previously found that vitamin D plays a “key” role in heart disease. The new research shows that a certain type of white blood cell is mire likely to adhere to cells in the wall of blood vessels when vitamin D levels are low.

    The study, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, looked at vitamin D levels in 43 patients with type 2 diabetes and 25 others who did not have diabetes. It found that white blood cells called monocytes were more likely to transform in to macrophages and adhere to the walls of blood vessels in patients with low vitamin D. This causes cholesterol to build and blocks blood flow.

    “We took everything into account,” said Dr. Amy Riek, lead author of the study. “We looked at blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes control, body weight and race. But only vitamin D levels correlated to whether these cells stuck to the blood vessel wall.”

    Riek and Bernal-Mizrachi are now treating mice with vitamin D to see whether giving the vitamin to diabetics might reverse their risk of clogged arteries. They are also conducting clinical trials in patients.

    “In the future, we hope to generate medications, potentially even vitamin D itself, that help prevent the deposit of cholesterol in the blood vessels,” said Bernal-Mizrachi. “Previous studies have linked vitamin D deficiency in these patients to increases in cardiovascular disease and in mortality. Other work has suggested that vitamin D may improve insulin release from the pancreas and insulin sensitivity. Our ultimate goal is to intervene in people with diabetes and to see whether vitamin D might decrease inflammation, reduce blood pressure and lessen the likelihood that they will develop atherosclerosis or other vascular complications.”

  • Multivitamins Don’t Reduce Heart Disease Risk, Says Study

    A new study has found that daily multivitamin use does not reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in men. The findings were presented this week at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2012 and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. A similar study last month did find that multivitamins can reduce the risk of cancer in men by 8%.

    “The findings from our large clinical trial do not support the use of a common daily multivitamin supplement for the sole purpose of preventing cardiovascular disease in men,” said Howard Sesso, lead author of the new study and an associate epidemiologist in the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). “The decision to take a daily multivitamin should be made in consultation with one’s doctor and consideration given to an individual’s nutritional status and other potential effects of multivitamins, including the previously reported modest reduction in cancer risk.”

    The study looked at almost 15,000 men over the age of 50, following them for over 10 years. The men were randomly assigned to take a multivitamin or a placebo daily. Comparing the two groups, researchers fount no significant difference in the risk of heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular mortality. Additionally, the multivitamin had no effect on the participants who already had a history of heart disease, or those who did not.

    “Since so many Americans take daily multivitamins, studies like this are key to providing us with valuable information about what specific benefits multivitamins do or do not provide in terms of their long-term impact on chronic diseases,” said Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, chief of the Division of Aging at BWH. “For cardiovascular disease, we must continue to emphasize a heart-healthy diet, physical activity, smoking cessation and regular screening for cardiovascular risk factors.”

  • Don Lapre, Famous Internet Marketer Commits Suicide

    Don Lapre was a famous and infamous internet marketer who committed suicide over the weekend while waiting in jail for his trial. Lapre had been arrested for 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, promotional money laundering, and transactional money laundering.

    Lapre started his business in 1990, based around credit repair. Soon after he began selling booklets, helping people receive a FHA insurance refund after their mortgages had been paid. This led to his first big moneymaker, when he started an infomercial stating people could make $50,000 a week using his strategy which was based around “tiny classified ads” in newspapers.

    Lapre’s first trouble with the law came in 2005, when the FDA accused Lapre of making false promises about a vitamin he was involved in selling. His business claimed the vitamin would assist against diseases such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, insomnia, cancer, and arthritis. He would receive two warnings from the FDA before finally taking “The Greatest Vitamin in the World” website down.

    Lapre would come to be monitored by consumer watchdog groups, claiming Lapre was selling false get-rich-quick-schemes online. On June 8th, 2011, Lapre was indicted by a grand jury for selling worthless internet businesses. He was accused of scamming 220,000 victims out of $52 million. On October 2, Lapre died from what appears to be suicide, but his death is still under investigation.

    On his site DonLapre.com, there are photos of Lapre’s house and family along with a lengthy goodbye message.

    Don Lapre Suicide

    I tried to create the best product on earth, paid out millions, made very little trying to make it a success, had attorneys review my entire company, paid out millions in refunds, tried to make the commission and products better every single year, and in spite of all that, I have been accused of something I did not do. I did not have the perfect company but never once did I allow one thing to be done that would violate any law. Nevertheless, because the majority of people did not make money, in spite of everyone of them being able to make as many $1000 checks as they wanted, I am left to fight a battle that will for sure destroy what energy I have left inside… I hope the pictures below motivate you to take a chance in life and try to do the impossible… It did not work out for me with my vitamins but I believe that being willing to fail is part of having a chance at success…. Never stop dreaming and for all those who sent me testimonials of what you did because of some of my help, I am grateful I made a small difference in your life…