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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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.
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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Much Needed Book,
By A reader (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry (Hardcover)
This book should be a must read for anyone interested in alternative health. Before reading this book I thought that the herbal and vitamin industry was full of health minded individuals that wanted to help people avoid using prescription drugs. This book shows that the herbal and vitamin industry is as much about profit as any other business including the pharmaceutical industry. The author clearly points out that herb, vitamins, and supplements are almost totaly unregulated, that the ingredients labels on them are a joke, and anyone interested in using them should be sure to educate themselves about what they are using, how it was manufactured, and who is selling the product.
43 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Irresponsible,
By
This review is from: Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry (Hardcover)
As a scientist I found this book quite disappointing and found several instances where the author misinterprets the scientific literature. Here is one example of this distortion. There have been about 40 reasonably designed studies conducted on St Johns Wort for depression. In sum, the science has clearly demonstrated that SJW is efficacious. However there a few trials that have failed to find a beneficial effect...and for understandable reasons that have now been clarified, i.e. source, dose, number of subjects, etc. The author uses one of these federally funded studies to demean the value of saint johns wort and concludes that it does not work. That is simply irresponsible and untrue. This is analogous to testing 40 automobiles for their ability to get a person to work on time. In a few of the tests the person does not make it to work on time because either the car breaks down, there is too much traffic, the person leaves late or there is not enough gas in the tank. However, the vast majority of people make it to work on time. Using this authors logic, the conclusion would be that cars dont work for getting people to point B on time.
It appears that the author did a fair amount of research on this book and therefore knows that SJW is efficacious when used appropriately. The question then becomes why distort the truth, which I do not have an answer for. As the book points out bloodroot is indeed caustic and I have used it myself. However it is not a dietary supplement. The person who used burnt off her nose by using bloodroot is one extreme example. After poking around on the internet the US justice system found her claim to be unfounded, yet the author of this book takes her word as gospel.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very useful,
By
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This review is from: Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry (Hardcover)
I spent a lot of money on vitamins and minerals before I red this book. It was an eye opener for me. Not so much that one shouldn't take any supplements, but to seriously look at their effectiveness and possible side effects. Easy to read and lots of information about the supplement industry that you might not know.
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