HealingDeva.com

[Terri R.]

Consumer Reports Article Support FDA's Attempt To Regulate or Outlaw All Nutritional Supplements

The cover of the May, 2004 Consumer Reports magazine blares in bold type: "Dangerous Supplements!" Inside, readers are taken on a tour of what can only be called "FDA approved propaganda" about prescription drugs, herbs and consumer safety. The emphasis of the article is that people are being harmed by dangerous herbs while pharmaceuticals are certified as safe and well tested.

The article makes absolutely no mention of the 100,000 deaths and more than two million injuries caused by prescription drugs each year. There's no call to action for the FDA to ban these dangerous drugs, no mention of the 40,000 additional deaths caused by over-the-counter pain relief medications each year, and of course no mention of the FDA's full approval of highly toxic, disease-causing food ingredients like aspartame (which accounts for nearly 75% of all food ingredient side effect complaints to the FDA) and sodium nitrite (proven to cause brain cancer and leukemia, yet it's added to virtually all packaged meat products found in every grocery store).

In fact, Consumer Reports has chosen to use its considerable influence to unjustifiably scare the public into thinking nutritional supplements are somehow more dangerous than drugs. It does this by naming 12 nutritional supplements "dangerous." The list includes herbs that have been safely used by literally millions of people around the world for centuries, if not thousands of years. Many of these herbs are well known to be perfectly safe: kava, bitter orange, lobelia and yohimbe all have a long track record of safe, effective use with very few side effects. Compared to prescription drugs, in fact, medicinal herbs used in their natural form by everyday consumers have virtually no negative side effects.

FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.consumerwellness.org/actionalert_consumer_reports.html