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Do you know what's in them?

Amphetamines Hiding In Your Supplements

A new study found a synthetic amphetamine that’s never been tested on humans in 11 different supplements. Worst of all, reveal the authors, the FDA has known about it for years.
Drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry are hardly perfect. Contrary to the refrain that repeats as reliably as the dawn in the comments every time I suggest that vaccines are safe and effective, or that consumers shouldn’t waste their money on magical water, I am neither a paid shill for Big Pharma nor one who believes their products are the answer to every ill.

Pharmaceuticals often have nasty side effects, don’t always work for every patient, and can be misused or overprescribed. But at least when I prescribe a patient amoxicillin or suggest he or she pick up some ibuprofen, I can be confident that the medication consumed will contain the proper ingredients.

People who opt to take herbal supplements, on the other hand? Not so much.

Witness the findings of a new study published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis. The authors collected samples of 21 products that claim to be manufactured from Acacia rigidula, most marketed as a weight-loss supplement. More than half of the products tested showed the presence of a synthetic amphetamine—one that has never been tested for safety in humans. (It is telling that, in trying to find more information about the shrub from which these supplements are supposedly derived, my searching yielded page after page of links to such products.) Turns out that ß-methylphenylethylamine (BMPEA), the chemical the researchers identified, only comes from a lab, not from a plant growing in the desert Southwest.

What makes this study’s findings all the more dismaying is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted its own study of these supplements in 2013 and found the exact same ingredient. The new report was meant to determine if the agency’s findings had led to the removal of BMPEA from Acacia rigidula products, as one might hope would be the result if federal regulators were to discover a chemical adulterant in a supposedly natural weight-loss formula. Alas, the researchers found a higher percentage of artificially enhanced powders and pills than that discovered two years ago.

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