Essentials of Nutrition for Sports

treatment of guar gum-associated

esophageal obstruction led to a

recall of weight-control products

containing this ingredient.

Investigation identified 17 cases. Evaluation of this series of cases resulted in a product recall and a reclassification of weight control products containing gua

r gum as, “not being generally

recognized as safe and effective.”

-^

Chromium: The strength gainer, weight control, and cholesterol reducer of the nineties found its way into, and remains in many supplements marketed for enha

ncing strength. Unfortunately,

some sources were found to be toxic and carcinogenic.

-^

Creatine: Every athlete needed this product, until many found no improvement in aerobic endurance performance, and others noticed fluid retention or that cramps worsened their performance.

-^

Laetrile: This over-the-counter apricot pit cancer-cure-all turned out to be not so much a cure-all as a toxic make-all-sick.

-^

L-tryptophan: Marketed to help sleep. However, unregulated for purity, sources turned out to be

contaminated and associated with

over 1,000 cases of the muscle disorder eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. Withdrawn from the US market 1990.

-^

Metabolife: One of the all-time hyped weight-loss methods, the company is now being sued in a class action lawsuit and the CEO indicted for misleading the public about the serious side effects of one of its components, ephedrine. We all know ephedrine is bad

now

; but then many thought it great.

-^

Melatonin: Has been touted as a cure-all for everything from sleep disorders and jet lag to cancer and AIDS. By some accounts, it can prevent or cure

diabetes, catarac

ts, Alzheimer’s

disease, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Its proponents have claimed that it can reverse the aging process and energize a lackluster libido.

A recent editorial in

Nature

quotes Dr. Fred Turek, Director

of the Center for Circadian Biology and Medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago: “The data are simply inconclusive.” Says Dr. Richard Wurtman, director of clinical research at MIT: “Melatonin has been vastly overhyped.”

For more about problems with melatonin, see page

151

.

Prescription

It is not just unregulated over-the-counter substances that are

potentially toxic. Pharmaceutical drugs must be proven safe and effective in order to be marketed. The pressure on the FDA to approve new drugs is great, and many important side effects are known only after many decades of use, sometimes by tens of millions of people.

From the years 1979 through 2000, roughly 3% of all new drugs

were later withdrawn because of problems, often life-threatening.

27

If heavily-regulated products regularly have such problems, it is

easy to project that unregulated nutritionals, products that don’t have to be proven effective or safe to be marketed, may be more problematic.

Consider these recent drug problems:

-^

Estrogens: Thought to be a fountain-of-youth for menopausal women, and thought to improve memory and brain function. Only after use for many decades by more than 100 million women did studies indicate that, overall, estrogens worsen brain function and shortened life expectancy.

-^

Cholesterol-lowering drugs: Can lowering cholesterol be a bad idea? Well yes, if the agents used increase depression and suicides—as some are reported to do.

-^

Baycol (cerivastatin, cholesterol-lowering drug). Rhabdo-myolysis (severe muscle reaction with cell death). Withdrawn 2001.

27 http://www.fda.gov/cder/present/roundtable/sld004.htm

. Accessed 10-16-2004.

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