 Let's suppose you're at the grocery store and you've filled your shopping cart with the usual junk food items and you're feeling a bit guilty over your lack of green and leafies. So you head over to the aisle marked health products. You immediately notice a wide array of colorfully marked bottles. This one claims to support liver health. Another says research shows that these saw palmetto supplements can prevent prostate cancer. How will you evaluate the claims they make? In this video, I want to introduce you to how supplements and health foods manage to make claims about health benefits without any research to back it up. There are two concepts I'll be introducing you to. Weasel words and the quack Miranda warning. By the end of the video, you'll be a better educated consumer. So when you do wander through the health food aisle, you can more fairly assess product claims. I'll also briefly touch on how these loopholes were created and who's responsible. For my non-American viewers, I want to explain the idea of a Miranda warning. A U.S. Supreme Court case, Miranda versus Arizona, held that anyone arrested on suspicion of a crime must be made aware of their rights. In 1966, a man named Ernesto Miranda was arrested on suspicion of armed robbery, rape, and kidnapping of a mentally handicapped young woman. He incriminated himself during interrogation, which led to a full confession, all without being given access to an attorney or being made aware that he could simply have remained silent. His appeal led to the standard declaration of rights that prevents criminals from being able to claim ignorance. For the sake of historical completeness, I should point out that Miranda was later retried and convicted without his confession, sentenced to 20 to 30 years. He was paroled six years later in 1972 and was stabbed to death in a bar fight in 1976. The quack Miranda warning is a similarly defensive statement to the one the police use. So long as a product bears a specific phrase, it has wide latitude to make health claims without being regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration. Here's the quack Miranda. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So long as that's on the advertisement and or package, you can put statements like supports colon health on a candy bar or bag of chips and it will technically be true in the sense that people who are starving have very poor colon health and having a positive caloric intake is therefore necessary to support colon health. Those saw palmetto capsules can say scientifically shown to improve prostate health. And that will be true in the sense that at least one study out of dozens, the one in fact that had the smallest population size and the least rigorous conditions. But again, if they don't make a claim to treat or cure or prevent any specific condition, they can't really be sued. Never mind that the large well designed clinical trials have found no benefit of any kind to taking palmetto and in fact there can be quite negative side effects. The deception is permitted so long as the quack cure contains the magic incantation often in quite small print. The marketers for these quack cures have learned some very specific weasel words, words which don't put them at risk of being regulated by the FDA because they're too broad or vague to mean anything. Supports heart health for example or may help with weight management or my favorite clinically studied or laboratory tested. Not demonstrated to work mind you just studied or tested. You'll find the terms support and promotes used liberally on unregulated vitamin products as well as may help with. These are terms with no specific meaning and even when the product actually does have a known benefit they'll still use the weasel words because an FDA regulated product also has to be manufactured under much more strict conditions, which increases cost and decreases profit. Then we come to the weasel words that you might find on health foods, all natural, healthy, herbal, nourishing. What they fail to mention is that these terms are not regulated and can be put on virtually any product. No added sugar and low fat labels do have some requirements spelled out in 21 CFR 101. Zero calories means any product where a serving has five or fewer calories as bizarre as that sounds. Sugarless products can contain up to half a gram of sugar per serving, which in a two gram stick of gum means it can be up to 25% sugar and still be labeled as sugarless or sugar free. Technically a tic-tac candy mint can be labeled sugar free despite the primary ingredient being sugar because a serving size is just below half a gram, which is an unfortunate example of accurately rounding down. Reduced calorie or reduced sugar can be used if the sugar or calorie content has been reduced by 25% from a similar product, so a serving of high fat, high sugar foods can be labeled reduced calorie with just minor changes to formulation and serving size. Someone on a weight reducing diet can be forgiven for being confused into buying foods that are bad for them. I can't speak to whether the food marketers who target dieters are doing this on purpose as a tactic to keep people unable to successfully lose weight or if it's simply a matter of not losing competitive advantage on taste or manufacturing costs. What I can say is that confusing health claims on vitamins, supplements and foods marketed at diet conscious shoppers represents a failure to properly regulate those industries. To understand how the US came to the point where we allow intentionally confusing product marketing, we need to go back to 1991. There were two proposed bills in the US Congress that would have eliminated the loopholes and advertising free for all of nutritional and health claims, strengthening the regulatory function of the Food and Drug Administration. One of these bills, the Nutrition Coordinating Act of 1991, required that the FDA approve any health claim made on the label before the product could be released, a process that would have ended the confusing claims previously mentioned. The dietary supplement industry heavily lobbied and managed to get the bill defeated. The mouthpieces of the industry began anti-regulation public relations campaigns. They claimed that regulation would kill their industry, increase costs to the consumers, and result in a loss of American jobs. But it was behind the scenes that they played their strongest card. In 1994, two US Senators, or in Hatch, a Utah Republican, and Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, introduced the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Under the 1994 Act, dietary supplements were to be regulated as food items under the FDA, rather than under the more stringent pharmaceutical standards. Any company could bring to market any supplement without prior testing or evaluation, so long as the ingredients could reasonably be expected to be safe for human consumption. Even that standard didn't apply to products grandfathered in from before 1994. No testing needed to be done for whether a claim was true, whether the dosages were consistent or accurate, and the FDA could only ban a supplement if there were sufficient adverse events to raise concerns about safety. There really are two types of products protected under this Act, those that do nothing that are marketed for doing something, and those that do something but wouldn't pass the standards for pharmaceutical drugs. Orin Hatch has been called a natural ally of the supplements industry. Many supplements companies make their home in his state of Utah, and it's big business, $25 billion a year. Hatch's son, Scott, is a lobbyist for the supplements industry, and his daughter's family own a chiropractic clinic where they sell supplements. He is currently the president pro-temporary, which makes him third in the line of succession to the US presidency. The other author of the bill, Tom Harkin of Iowa, now retired from the Senate, is a well known advocate of alternative medicine. He was the driving force behind the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, and comes at the issue from the perspective of protecting holistic health practices. I find the contrast between the two authors of this bill interesting, the capitalist personal motivations of Hatch, and the liberal alt-med motivations of Harkin, both leading to a misguided bill that deregulated health protections, and ultimately make American consumers less safe from fraud and harm. What is needed in the US is smarter regulation that requires transparency on the part of manufacturers, liability for harm, and the highest standards of labeling, testing, and quality. I hope for a day when I can walk down the vitamin aisle at a drug store and see a bottle that says, this product has been strictly tested in double-blind trials to actually reduce your risk of colon cancer by 20% if taken daily, and its manufacturer meets the FDA's requirements for safe and consistent manufacturing quality. That's something, as a now properly informed consumer, I could make a smart decision on. Thanks for watching.