Feds Need to Crack Down on Herbal Supplements

Today's NYT piece by Gina Kolata on the uselessness of Vitamin D and calcium supplements highlights the need for these remedies to be better regulated.

Today's New York Times piece by Gina Kolata on the uselessness of Vitamin D and calcium supplements makes timely again this piece I wrote a year ago:

Did you know that there exists an all-natural remedy for memory loss? Weight gain? Macular degeneration? Prostate enlargement? These products are so successful that clinical testing has already begun! Just listen to the following testimonial from an unidentified person ...

As these ads blare at you from your favorite AM radio station, perhaps you wonder: How can this be legal? Since the late 1960s, aspirin makers have been trying to win the right to tell the public that a daily low-dose tablet can help prevent heart disease. They have been told no, and no, and no again.

Federal regulators are so nervous about over-selling aspirin's benefits that they have restricted statements about aspirin to the most bland and basic. Yet while the statements about aspirin have to be cushioned in the vaguest generalities, snake oil flim-flam can be huckstered in the most truth-defying way, thanks to a 1994 law coaxed through Congress by the people who make these drugs.

You can read the whole thing on the CNN.com website.