Oct 27 2008
Health Foods and Nutritional Supplements
One of the many powerful forces in advertising today is the drive for healthier living. Media targets consumers from all angles with directed ads concerning our health and well-being. For the most part this kind of awareness is a very good thing.
Like all consumer choices, the choices we make concerning our health should be made cautiously and with a reasonable amount of research. Of course everyone doesn’t have time to become a nutritional expert, but it doesn’t hurt to google a particular product and read a few trusted reviews.
Many nutritional supplements have not received a high level of scrutiny, and should be purchased with caution. Though the health risks in most cases are slight by using these products, the health benefits are also often an unknown quantity. The benefits of colloidal silver , for example, are highly controversial. I am amazed that in our day of science and innovation people still fall for advertising that this product cures (almost overnight) over 500 diseases. If this were true we would need far fewer medical professionals.
Understanding that quacks and snake oil salesmen in the 18th and 19th century started businesses based around dubious products and scams can help to understand our continued fascination with pills and elixirs of every sort. Before medical practice became regulated to the degree that it is now, many purported doctors claimed to have developed cures for everything from gout to warts and they traveled from town to town selling their wares to anyone desperate enough to try it.
The Food and Drug administration was established specifically to curtail this type of behavior, but legislation has made it legal for Nutritional Supplements to enter the marketplace without undergoing the same rigorous testing that prescription medications face. This means that the products available for purchase at health food stores may not have been proven in clinical studies and that there is not a requirement even to have been tested. In essense the risk lies entirely with the consumer.
In most cases the risk involved is nothing more than your money and false hopes. For many supplements this is only a few dollars. In most cases health will not deteriorate, but the risk of side effects is very real and largely undocumented. The greatest risk is that a person will make the choice to put the little money they have for health care towards these unproven products rather than finding a competent medical professional.
