Product Description

A riveting work of investigative journalism that charts the rise of the dietary supplement craze and reveals the dangerous—and sometimes deadly—side of these highly popular and completely unregulated products.

Over 60 percent of Americans buy and take herbal and dietary supplements for all sorts of reasons—to prevent illness (vitamin C), to ease depression (St. John’s wort), to aid weight loss (ephedra), to boost the memory (ginkgo biloba), and even to cure cancer (shark cartilage, bloodroot)—despite the fact that few of these “natural” supplements have been proven to be safe or effective. The vitamin and herbal supplement industry generates over $20 billion a year by selling products that promise to cure or fix, but are produced and marketed essentially without oversight. And while the media has been quick to sensationalize the benefits of supplements, few have taken a hard look at the dangers posed by many of the remedies flooding the market today. Award-winning journalist Dan Hurley breaks the silence for the first time in Natural Causes.
From the snake-oil salesmen of the early twentieth century, to rise of the health food movement in the sixties and seventies, Hurley charts the remarkable growth of an industry built largely on fraud, and reveals the backroom politics that led to the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which effectively freed the industry from FDA oversight. In unprecedented detail, he shows how supplement manufacturers have concealed the truth about dozens of untested treatments and the shocking rise in deaths, disfigurements, and life-threatening injuries caused by products deceptively promoted as “safe and natural.” Most importantly, he provides a telling look at why, in an age of unprecedented scientific advancement, we continue to buy and believe in remedies for which little evidence exists—and why the supplements we take to promote our health may be doing far more harm than good.
As Hurley shows, the dietary supplement craze may be one of the greatest swindles ever perpetrated on the American public—one that feeds billions of dollars each year into the pockets of lobbyists, politicians, and any charlatan who wants to slap a label on a bottle and tout it as the next big “natural cure.” Blending hard facts with spellbinding personal stories, Natural Causes is a must-read for anyone who has ever popped a multivitamin or an herb, and provides a hard-hitting, frightening look at a cultural trend that is out of control.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #458889 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-26
• Released on: 2007-12-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In his lively debut, health and medical journalist Hurley takes aim at the $21 billion supplement industry and its potentially injurious "natural" products. He critiques its strong-arming of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act through Congress—a law that rendered the FDA virtually powerless to regulate these remedies—and observes the FDA's "coziness" with the industry it regulates. From snake oil and shark cartilage to ephedra, Hurley consistently animates patches of dry legal and medical material with harrowing case studies. Sue Gilliatt, for example, burned off her nose when she used the Native American herbal remedy bloodroot to treat her skin cancer in 2001. When Dorothy Wilson's doctor prescribed L-tryptophan for her insomnia in 1988, the over-the-counter amino acid triggered a mysterious disease that left her painfully incapacitated by nerve damage. Although Hurley presents scanty evidence regarding vitamin C's inability to prevent colds, his claim about the criminal backgrounds of several supplement manufacturers is alarming. Hurley wraps up with a refreshingly tough-love conclusion: the bamboozled have to accept some of the blame themselves for wanting a quick-fix promise of good health without having to do the work of a salubrious lifestyle. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Hurley maintains that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 is one of the worst laws on the books. Shielding vitamins and herbal concoctions from FDA testing, it requires only that no curative claims be made for such "dietary supplements." In the prologue, Hurley shows that curative claims are made, anyway, and the users of an herbal salve were able to sue when the stuff ate their flesh. Subsequent chapters cite cases that also show that per-dosage amounts of dietary-supplement ingredients are often improperly listed; that greater than standard recommended daily amounts of most vitamins wreak havoc in the body; and that natural doesn't mean safe or effective. He notes the high proportion of convicted felons in the supplement industry, sketching the careers of several of the most egregious, including best-selling self-help health author Kevin Trudeau. He points to research that nullifies common knowledge about the effectiveness of virtually all dietary supplements; food, not pills, is the optimal and probably the only means of properly ingesting vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and so forth. He puts all such substantive information in the context of plenty of absorbing and moving stories of death, deceit, and political chicanery. Truly a good book that is good for you. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“A well-written and detailed expose. . . A strident wake-up call.”— Business Week

“Highly readable . . . [Hurley’s] crisp narrative will shock many Americans.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An engrossing book [and] a much-needed corrective to the promotion of so-called natural treatments . . . [Natural Causes] deserves a wide audience.” —New England Journal of Medicine

Customer Reviews

Everyone Who Takes Vitamins Should Read This Book
This is an important book. We read about melamine in pet food from China killing our pets, and we assume our own government regulates American products to prevent such tragedies. It does, for food and drugs. But there is a crucial loophole. Since the DSHEA was passed in 1994, anything sold as a diet supplement bypasses government regulation. The fiction is that these supplements are food; that people are taking them to replace something lacking in their diet. The reality is that no one has ever had a deficiency of St. John's wort or echinacea in their diet: people are taking these for medicinal purposes. Drugs can't go on the market until they are tested for effectiveness and safety; known side effects must be communicated to the consumer; there is a system in place to detect problems after marketing; there are safeguards of quality and dosage control. None of this is true for diet supplements. An independent lab that tests vitamins and diet supplements estimates that there is only a 75% chance that you are getting what the label says.

These products are widely assumed to be safe because they are natural. Hurley explains why this is a false assumption. About a third of prescription drugs come from natural sources. A drug is a drug, whether it was made in a plant or in a lab. Anything natural that has a therapeutic effect is likely to have side effects. We are increasingly seeing reports of people whose diet supplements interfered with the prescription drugs they were taking or contributed to excessive bleeding after surgery, people who required liver transplants after taking Kava kava, people who developed kidney failure after taking a weight loss pill, and people like Steve Bechtel who might be alive today if he had not used ephedra.

People complain about "Big Pharma" but the diet supplement industry is a hugely profitable business that has deliberately organized itself and successfully lobbied to change our laws for their own financial benefit. They say they are protecting the public's right to choose, but they are also undermining the public's right to be safe. And the worst thing is that they are misinforming the public. Hurley names names and reports a surprising number of known scam artists and convicted felons in the business.

Hurley lambastes the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine: it has spent many millions of our tax dollars checking out unlikely remedies, and so far the results of all its research have been almost exclusively negative. Notably, recent NCCAM studies have concluded with a high degree of confidence that echinacea, saw palmetto, and glucosamine/chondroitin are ineffective.

Hurley covers the evidence for vitamin pills and shows how recent studies are increasingly showing that they probably do more harm than good. He finds only two supplements that have good evidence behind them for use by the general public. If I hadn't already thrown my multivitamins away after doing my own research, I would have done so after reading this book.

Hurley discusses why intelligent people forget the "buyer beware" principle and fall for diet supplement claims. We have been sold a bill of goods, both by cynical marketers and by well-meaning but misinformed friends. There is a huge body of mythology out there, and we owe it to ourselves to apply our critical thinking skills to the claims.

I support the right of everyone to choose diet supplements, but I also support the right of everyone to have all the information needed to make an informed choice. This book is a valuable tool to help the consumer understand what he is really buying. It should open a lot of eyes. I think everyone who buys a diet supplement or even a multivitamin owes it to himself to know what is in this book.

RIFE WITH ERRORS, POORLY RESEARCHED
Whatever Mr. Hurley’s agenda might be, he is free to have is own point of view and to write about it. The essential problem with this book is that its fundamental thesis is undercut by the incredibly poor job of fact checking by Mr. Hurley and his editors. Let’s take two very fundamental mistakes that could have been corrected with even the most basic fact checking.For one, the author couldn't even get the name of the CEO of Natrol, who he claims to have interviewed, correct. The name of Natrol's founder and Chairman of the Board is Elliott Balbert. Mr. Hurley repeatedly refers to him as Mitchell Balbert. Did anyone bother to do any fact checking? This mistake could have been “discovered” if anyone associated with the publication of this book had simply gone to Natrol’s web page and verified the name of the company’s Chairman of the Board.

Let's take another, even more fundamental error give the subject matter of this publication. Mr. Hurley discusses the plight of a woman who claims that her nose fell off because of a product she put on it to treat what she thought was skin cancer. Suspend reality and set aside whatever questions you have about someone who claims to be a nurse self-treating her skin cancer in the manner described by Mr. Hurley. The real problem is that any topical product such as the one described in this section of Mr. Hurley's book is not a dietary supplement, and cannot be legally sold as one in the United States. By law such products are drugs. If either Mr. Hurley or his editors had bothered to look at the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, they could have avoided this fundamental mistake.

If the author could make these kinds of basic mistakes and his editors could bother to undertake the effort to fact check such basic assertions like these, what level of confidence should anyone have in Mr. Hurley's "facts"?

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an attorney specializing in food in drug law. Many of my clients are in the dietary supplement/natural products industry.