Dietary Supplements - Shorts

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Dec, 2002  by Jule Klotter

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The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) announced in its Fall 2002 newsletter that it is co-funding with the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, four centers for dietary supplement research. The research centers, which will focus on botanicals and herbals, are at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Arizona, the University of California (Los Angeles), and Purdue University. In addition, individual grants for research on the herbs feverfew, echinacea, and milk thistle are being funded by NCCAM and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Among the stated goals for the botanical research is the desire to "gain insights and approaches that could lead to the development of purer and more standardized products." Herbs and botanicals are among the most popular complementary therapies; yet studies have shown that the quality of the herbal products being sold in stores can differ greatly, and labels are not always accurate. One NCCAM study, for example, found that the concentration of ginseng (determined by chemical analysis) in 25 different commercial products did not always match the products' labeling: "Over half the products contained less than 50% of the labeled amount." All 25, however, did contain the type of ginseng that was printed on the label. Part of the difficulty with consistency in botanical supplements is that their effectiveness depends upon many factors: the species; what part(s) of the plant are used; when, where, and how a plant is grown and harvested; and how it is processed. Standardization is an attempt to create a more consi stent product. Currently, the US has no legal definition of or requirement for standardizing dietary supplements.

The International Bibliographic Information on Dietary Supplements (IBIDS) database (www.ods.od.nih.gov/databases/ibids.html) offers science-based information en vitamins, minerals, and some botanicals. The database is produced by the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements and maintained with the help of the US Department of Agriculture.

COPYRIGHT 2002 The Townsend Letter Group
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