What is in this article?:
- Spiked weight loss supplements make waves on Dr. Oz Show
- How can the natural industry combat spiking?
Recently on the Dr. Oz Show, a series of weight loss supplements were tested and found adulterated with undeclared pharmaceutical ingredients. The guest who conducted the tests, however, believes industry and FDA have the tools to make things better.
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The Dr. Oz Show has again made a splash in the natural products industry, except this time in a negative way. A segment on weight loss supplements—long indentified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a problem category—showed that all of the products featured on the show tested positive for undeclared pharmaceutical ingredients.
One of the guests on the show was Jim Neal-Kababick, director of Oregon-based Flora Research Laboratories, which conducted the tests. He described the spiking problem in the weight loss category as “worse than it’s ever been.”
The weight loss products were purchased in New York, according to what Dr. Oz said on the show, though he emphasized that similar products could be purchased anywhere. Most of them featured Chinese characters on the labels and had poorly translated label language and incomplete lists of ingredients.
The chief adulterant was the weight loss pharmaceutical sibutramine and its analogue versions. This drug was marketed in the U.S. under the name Meridia until it was pulled from shelves because of safety concerns. It has long been identified by FDA as an undeclared pharmaceutical contaminant in weight loss products. One of the products also was found to contain a prescription antibiotic, which Neal-Kababick attributed to sloppy manufacturing practices.
Why is supplement spiking getting worse?
Neal-Kababick attributed the rising tide of spiking problems in part to the ease with which chemists can synthesize new analogue forms of pharmaceuticals such as sibutramine or sildenafil in the erectile dysfunction category. As soon as a testing signature is worked out for the latest analogue, the spikers are on to the next, he said.
Most pharmaceutical research has been outsourced to India and China so there are thousands of PhD-level scientists getting paid a fraction of what their North American and European counterparts command. With the huge demand for weight loss and erectile dysfunction products—and the large amounts of cash in play—some of that demand is satisfied with analogues that go out the back door of these chemical labs, Neal-Kababick said.