I’ll Have A Serving Of Arsenic With My Kelp Supplement, Please
For two years, a 52 year-old women complained to her doctor about hair loss, fatigue and memory loss.
Her doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her and told her the symptoms she was experiencing were probably related to menopause.
This woman was taking a kelp supplement and since conventional medicine did not give her a diagnosis or a treatment, she increased her intake of the supplement hoping to get relief from her symptoms.
Instead of relief, over the next few months the woman’s short and long-term memory became so bad she could no longer remember her home address.
Soon she reported having a rash, nausea and vomiting. This made it very difficult to work and forced her to leave her job.
At this point her doctors became suspicious of arsenic poisoning. Tests were taken and arsenic was found in very high levels in her blood and urine.
She was told to discontinue her kelp supplements and within a few weeks her symptoms disappeared.
The doctors decided to go out and purchase 9 different kelp supplements from local health food stores and sent them out to be analyzed.
The results came back that 8 of the 9 were contaminated with arsenic and 7 had exceeded the tolerance levels for arsenic in food products set by the FDA.
A report in Environmental Health Perspectives reported that most kelp supplements on the market are contaminated with arsenic.
The FDA is asleep-at-the-wheel. They do not currently test food supplements for safety and efficacy and there is no requirement that manufacturers test their products either.
When choosing a food supplement, do you know what the quality controls are for the company manufacturing them?
We take for granted that our supplements are safe, but you can see from the above story, we need to pay attention.
That is why I use supplements manufactured by a COMPANY that runs over 300 quality control tests on a single product and over 80,000 quality control tests a year.
I put my trust in this company because I know the supplements they produce have been proven to be both safe and effective.
