A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine took a look at a decade’s worth of U.S. hospital admission data and found that over 23,0000 visits a year are actually due to substances people are taking to, theoretically, improve their health: vitamins and herbal supplements.
So why are people heading to the ER? Once the study had excluded accidental vitamin overdoses by kids (yes, a lot of vitamins do look — and taste! — very much like candy) the clear culprit were herbal supplements, especially those designed to bulk or slim your weight and those promising to give you the benefits of a good night’s rest, without actually having to rest. Curiously, this group, which made up about one-third of all the hospitalizations, was mostly made up of people in their 20s and early 30s — and their most common complaint was heart troubles.
The study is a good stand alone look at hospitalizations, but it also highlights a strange loophole in how America regulates supplements. Supplements fall into an odd grey area in the FDA where, while they technically can yank a product after the fact, they don’t actually “approve” products. In other words, no one is checking supplements to see that they actually do anything close to what they say they do, or even checking to see that they’re safe before they arrive in stores.
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