The FDA Smackdown

The FDA recently gave some purveyors of snake oil the smackdown:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that Brownwood Acres Foods Inc., Cherry Capital Services Inc. (doing business as Flavonoid Sciences) and two of their top executives have signed a consent decree that effectively prohibits the companies and their executives from manufacturing and distributing any products with claims in the label or labeling to cure, treat, mitigate or prevent diseases.

The consent decree of permanent injunction is a result of the companies and their executives making unapproved drug claims and unauthorized health claims about their products, such as "Chemicals found in Cherries may help fight diabetes." The companies are prevented from making these claims until the products are approved by the FDA as new drugs, exempt from approval as investigational new drugs, or until the claims on the products' label and labeling comply with the law.

I went to the Brownwood Acres website but didn't find any claims such as those to which the FDA objects. Nor could I find any links to supposedly independent sites touting their products. Back to the FDA:

The companies have a history of promoting unapproved claims on their product labels, brochures, and Web sites, stating that the products cure, treat, mitigate, or prevent various diseases. Most recently, the companies' Web sites referred customers to an apparently independent Web site, which was actually controlled by Brownwood Acres' president and contained similar unproven statements claiming benefits for their products.

False claims and deceptive advertising from a natural foods company? I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. The company's fruity products are touted with the line, "Powerful Antioxidants - To Attack Your Body's Harmful Free Radicals". (Oddly enough, preservatives such as BHA and BHT that are so scorned by natural food lovers are…guess what?...antioxidants.) So, do antioxidants actually attack the free radicals in your body?



According to Dr. Steven Novella, the jury is still out.

He points to a few studies which have shown the effect of antioxidants to be ambiguous, at best, and having no effect, at worst. One is the recent study which found that vitamins C and E, both having "significant antioxidant activity", did not lower incidence of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Novella:

The evidence for antioxidants in ALS is largely negative. In Parkinson’s disease (PD) the picture is a bit more complex. There is some evidence that eating Vitamin E rich foods may help prevent PD but not Vitamin E supplements. So perhaps it is something other than the Vitamin E in these foods that is of benefit, or perhaps eating healthy foods is simply a marker for some other variable that protect against PD. In other words, the evidence is ambiguous.

He concludes:

Antioxidants may one day play an important role in the treatment of certain diseases or in routine health maintenance, but so far there is insufficient evidence to make any confident predictions or to make specific recommendations.

Yet the public laps antioxidant claims up like water. I take back what I wrote above. The worst case scenario isn't that antioxidants have no effect, but rather that using some antioxidant supplements can increase your chances of dying sooner.