Watch Your Supplements and Herbal Remedies!

[starlight]

Mods, please put this where you think it'd get the most exposure.

I was reading an article about how FDA-unregulated supplements are more often than not NOT what is advertised on the bottle (only 2 out of the 12 companies tested were legit). Ran across this scary bit:


http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/222


"We also found contamination of a Ginkgo product with Juglans nigra (black walnut). Wallace et al.[3] also found contamination of an Echinacea product with walnut and advised that such contamination would be particularly dangerous for a consumer with nut allergies. However, we feel it is unlikely that nuts are the source of contamination, but rather leaves that often litter a very large area surrounding a tree in mid to late summer. It is conceivable that there may have been a field of commercial herbs bordered by walnuts (a common occurrence on the landscape), and that the target crop was harvested along with walnut leaves. Walnut leaves, woods, bark and fruits all contain juglone [32], which is toxic; juglone can lead to oxidative stress or electrophilicity [33-35]. The Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS?) [36] defines juglone as an equivocal tumorigenic agent (lungs, thorax and respiration, skin and appendages), which has been shown to promote skin tumors [37-39]. Ours and other studies [1,3] of herbal product contamination in the marketplace have not been able to identify all the contaminants to species-level resolution due to the lack of a complete SRM barcode library for herbal plants; a complete SRM library would include herbal species, related species and known toxic plants. It is possible that there were other contaminants that were missed because they could only be identified to family rather than to species."

[CMdeux]

Ex.act.ly.

I've been saying this for years.  We take a really MINIMAL number of supplements around here, and this is a huge reason why.

[twinturbo]

I think they have the rep in the US as more natural than "medicine". In non-English language the words between what is considered "supplement" and "medicine" is the same. And it's always with the unwritten rule watch your a**. Poison/therapeutic value can be too fine a line.

[jschwab]

Very interesting. One of the bad things about this sudden nut allergy (triggered by almonds) is that we like to wild forage and it hit just about the time all the nut trees were heavy ready for harvesting ruining my plans. I have about a million gingko nuts on the ground in my back yard that were going to roast for the first time this year (first time we had time). Almonds do not grown where I am in the East but I have seen it's advisable to be cautious. Black walnuts are everywhere...