S03E64 What Are We Putting in our Mouths? Investigating the Safety of Supplements

Do you take a multivitamin? Glucosamine? How about turmeric? What if the over-the-counter supplements you trust might be putting your health at risk? After having a patient whose surgery was postponed due to an abnormal blood test may have been caused by over-the-counter supplements, I started to investigate the safety of my own daily supplements,

The simple truth is that there is little to no official regulation. Companies can sell fraudulent supplements for years before being caught. But fortunately, there are organizations that perform independent testing and certification which can offer a degree of safety assurance.

Starting with my own fish oil supplement, I demonstrate how one can check a supplement's safety. We should certainly evaluate our supplement choices and the safety measures we take. Take a deep dive into the murky waters of over-the-counter supplements!

This week's thankful is a callback to Dr. Susan Love, and her Breast Book, which is a must read for anyone diagnosed with breast cancer, or supporting someone with breast cancer.

Connect with us on Instagram and YouTube to share your thoughts and questions. Find the podcast on YouTube or all the regular podcast outlets.

#thoughtfulplasticsurgery #podcast #plasticsurgery #cosmeticsurgery #boardcertified #plasticsurgeon #beauty #aesthetic #botoxandburpeespodcast @crossfittraining @crossfit #crossfit #sports #exercise #health #movement #crossfitcoach #clean #fitness

Click on your podcast site to listen and subscribe!

S03E64 What Are We Putting in our Mouths? Investigating the Safety of Supplements

[00:00:00] Sam Rhee: Do you take over the counter supplements? I do. I take over 10, maybe even 15 supplements every day. And I know many other people who take plenty of over the counter supplements too. How many people do you know that take vitamin D or calcium, glucosamine? How about a multivitamin? Maybe even a probiotic or fish oil? Maybe turmeric?

18 percent of America uses supplements according to one survey. We take supplements because we believe they can help our health, allow us to perform better at work, school, at the gym, and in our daily lives. Sometimes we have health issues that we believe can be helped by these supplements.

But I was reminded recently about the dangers of supplements as well. I had a patient whose procedure was canceled because of an abnormality on a routine blood test before surgery.

Rechecking the blood test several times, showed that the result, while only slightly abnormal, was consistently off. The surgery ended up being postponed until we could figure out what the issue was.

And the medical provider suspects that it may be due to one or several of the over the counter supplements the patient has been taking. So let's talk about supplements and safety.

I'm going to open by reminding people that I'm talking about my own personal experiences and I'm not giving medical advice to you as a physician.

And as always, this show is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It's for informational purposes only, and always seek the advice of your qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding your medical care. And don't disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice because of something that you hear from me.

The first thing is, is I'm not going to talk about whether any specific supplement or vitamin is good or bad. I may talk about that in the future in regards to my own anecdotal experience, but there are just too many products out there to say that everyone should avoid this or take that, or even if should be taking supplements in the first place.

A lot of it depends on our individual health. And of course, every medical provider, including me, will say that supplements are no substitute for a nutrient dense, healthy diet in the first place.

But let's suppose you've decided to take a particular supplement for whatever reason. How do you know it's actually what it says on the bottle? I have to admit, I've never actually checked the source of my supplements. I just went to Amazon, or whatever company, looked at the product page and the reviews.

But is there some sort of regulation in the United States to make sure that what I'm buying and taking is safe? Unfortunately, no. There is absolutely nothing that a company has to do before making and selling a supplement. No sample testing, no inspections, nothing. The Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, has policies called GMPs, or Good Manufacturing Guidelines, that state that there need to be proper designs, monitoring and controls in the making of supplements, but the FDA does not require companies to provide proof of GMPs before making and selling supplements.

The FDA will only investigate a company making supplements after it starts selling them, and then only if consumers start lodging complaints, or if they notice the company making false health claims without scientific evidence, such as the supplement can cure or treat certain types of diseases, or help with rapid weight loss, for example.

Therefore, as you can imagine, there are a lot of companies selling supplements fraudulently, sometimes for many years, before catching the FDA's attention. This can be disastrous, not only for the everyday consumer, but it may be even worse for elite athletes who may find they have consumed supplements tainted with drugs illegal in their sport.

This has happened in many sports, including weightlifting and CrossFit, for example. Products in the past, such as Jackd3D and OxyElitePro, which were popular pre-workout supplements, claimed to contain a hundred percent all natural geranium extract but actually resulted in multiple positive doping tests for methylhexanamine, a synthetic experimental stimulant that causes liver damage.

So how can we best navigate the potential minefield that is the supplement world? The most recommended way to ensure that a company's supplements are safe, is to see if they have independent organization testing and certification to make sure that that product was properly manufactured, actually contains the ingredients on the label as stated, and does not contain harmful level of other contaminants.

The three most well known independent testing organizations are ConsumerLab.com, NSF, the National Sanitation Foundation, and USP, or US Pharmacopoeia. Personally, unfortunately, I've been buying all my supplements without checking if any of them had independent organization in testing. So right off the bat, if I was a professional athlete, I could be testing positive for any number of substances without even knowing I was taking them.

Or even worse, I could have been poisoning myself and not even knowing with any of these supplements that I've been taking. So let me start with one of my supplements that I'm currently taking and let's see if I'm risking harm by taking it.

I'll start with my fish oil supplement. The one I take is called Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega, and it's sold on Amazon.com. It has a 4.7 star average score, with 46, 178 ratings, and it's currently the number one bestseller in omega 3 nutritional supplements. I have no stake or interest in the product, I just decided to buy it because it seemed very highly rated and popular, which I thought was enough to consider it safe.

But I never actually did the due diligence to check on the details. Now there's nothing on the Amazon product page about independent certification for this Ultimate Omega by Nordic Naturals. But when I went to their website, they do have a webpage where you can enter the product's lot number, and I entered my bottle's lot number, and it showed me the lot's expiration date, and a certificate of analysis, which included its fatty acid profile, level of environmental toxins such as PCBs, and the amount of heavy metal contamination such as lead and mercury. And all of the numbers on their listed certificate of analysis appeared appropriate to me.

Now this product is not independently certified, but if I wanted to be even more rigorous, Nordic Naturals also sells a slightly more expensive version of their fish oil supplement called Ultimate Omega Sport, which is actually certified by Sport by the NSF, and this NSF Sport certification is the certification that the USADA or the US Anti-Doping Agency, recommends for the athletes that take supplements. USADA manages the drug testing for all of the Olympic teams in the United States.

Now I don't need to worry about being drug tested for athletic competition, so I will stick to the cheaper Ultimate Omega product for now. But if I wanted the highest degree of assurance, I would get the sport version.

So it looks like for now I'm going to go through every single supplement I have and check to see if they are safe for me. It's going to be time consuming, but if I care about my health, checking the products that I'm putting into my body every single day is probably one of the more important things I need to do.

Do you have any other thoughts about how you best choose your supplements? Energy drinks? Pre workout? Let me know.

My weekly thankful... is Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book. I recently did a podcast about Dr. Susan Love a couple months ago when she passed. I just got a copy of her book and I'm reading it again to refresh my memory on breast cancer care. It really is one of the most well written resources about a specific disease that I have ever read, and I really wish that other diseases had something similar.

Someone recently told me rather than scour the internet for scary information about breast cancer, they were able to read the book which provided succinct and understandable information about their questions. Again, God bless Susan Love, and for anyone newly diagnosed with breast cancer or is caring for someone who was diagnosed with breast cancer, I could not recommend this book more highly.

As always, DM me @BotoxandBurpeesPodcast on Instagram. Or leave a comment at YouTube.com/@BotoxandBurpees. Thank you.