80 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
JW LTD/GETTY IMAGES“Just 21 percent of the test
results from store brand
herbal supplements verified
DNA from the plants listed
on the products’ labels,”
Schneiderman’s office
reported, “with 79 percent
coming up empty.” He
asked retailers to halt sales
of the products.
The next year, Nutrition
Business Journal conceded
that “intuition would suggest that the
New York attorney general’s actions in
early 2015 would have hurt sales, but
the herbs and botanicals category is one
of the strongest categories NBJ tracks.
... Internet sales in the category grew at
an astonishing 19.4 percent.”
“It makes you wonder why people
are doing this,” says Eliseo Guallar, the
epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health
who wrote the 2013 editorial in the
Annals of Internal Medicine. “I wish we
had better data about what the thought
process is in people’s heads.”
MARKETING MAGIC?
Perhaps — and this is just a wild
guess — it’s due in part to the
relentless advertising and marketing of
supplements. Because of the Dietary
Supplement Health and Education Act
of 1994, manufacturers of vitamins,
herbs and other supplements are not
required to prove to the FDA that a
product is either safe or effective before
selling it. Moreover, they can legally
market any product with vague claims
such as “maintains immune function,”
so long as they don’t specifically say that
it actually treats or cures anything.
But advertising isn’t so all-powerful.
If it were, those television commercials
by the fossil fuel industry would have
convinced everyone by now that coal
can be “clean.” So why do products
like Cold-EEZE and Airborne keep
on selling, even after class-action suits
and Federal Trade Commission actions
alleging that their claims of treating
the common cold were
unsubstantiated?
One could point to the
increasingly negative view
that Americans hold about
the mainstream health
care system. Back in 1975,
Gallup asked how highly
people regarded various
institutions in American
society. When it came to
the “medical system,” 44
percent of Americans said they had
a “great deal” of confidence in it,
while 36 percent said they had “quite
a bit.” A mere 13 percent said they
had only “some” confidence, and just
4 percent said they had “very little.”
Jump ahead four decades, to 2016,
and the change is startling: Only
17 percent said they had a “great deal”
of confidence in the medical system,
and only 22 percent had “quite a lot.”
(The two combined dropped by more
than half, from a total of 80 percent in
1975 to 39 percent in 2015.)
By contrast, the proportion
who said they had “some”
confidence more than
doubled, from 13 percent to
36 percent, while the segment
who had “very little” jumped
nearly sixfold, to 23 percent.
It’s nothing personal
against traditional health
care providers. Another
Gallup poll, from December 2016,
found the highest-rated professions for
honesty and ethical standards to be
nurses, with 84 percent of people rating
them “very high/high,” followed by
pharmacists at 67 percent and medical
doctors at 65 percent. Health insurers,
on the other hand, may be drawing
most of the incoming fire against the
broader health system. Only 12 percent
of respondents in the same poll ranked
HMO managers as “very high/high”
on ethical standards, compared with 31
percent who rated them “low.”
Whatever the reason, the American
public today is more inclined tolisten to an industry selling “natural”
supplements than to a medical
establishment selling boring old science.IT’S ALL ABOUT IDENTITY
Ultimately, beliefs stay in place when
they fulfill a need and strengthen
people’s sense of identity, of who they
are or what they aspire to be.
Dan Kahan, professor of law and
psychology at Yale Law School,
sees public understanding of science
through what he and other researchers
call cultural cognition. He has
investigated people’s conflicting views
on climate change, new technologies
and other areas where public
perceptions trail scientific consensus.
“Cultural cognition can influence
everything from what people believe
they have seen with their own eyes
to how they perform a mathematical
calculation,” he told me. “With the
goal of maintaining their status in
some affinity group, people are very
resourceful when it comes
to making arguments. It’s
easy to go on the internet
to find support for just
about anything.”
So liberals take vitamins
and other supplements
because they love all
things “natural” and
hate big pharmaceutical
companies and private
insurers, while corporation-worshipping
conservatives take them because they
love free markets and hate nanny-state
bureaucrats telling them what they can
and can’t take for their own health.
And science nerds of all stripes who
wonder how anyone can be so ignorant
as to deny clear scientific results might
try this experiment: Open a bottle of
multivitamins, put one in your mouth
and swallow the bitter pill of self-
recognition.^ DDan Hurley is a medical reporter whose friends
and family generally ignore his self-righteous
prattling about supplements.65%
of people with
a postgraduate
education take
vitamins.
Prognosis