This is why supplements need to be regulated as well

It is a common problem around the world that supplements are not regulated as heavily as medicine and food in general, which causes some serious problems from time to time. Here is the latest example from Japan:

5 dead, 114 hospitalized from recalled Japanese health supplements

In the week since a line of Japanese health supplements began being recalled, five people have died and more than 100 people were hospitalized as of Friday.

Osaka-based Kobayashi Pharmaceutical Co came under fire for not going public quickly with problems known internally as early as January. The first public announcement came March 22.

Company officials said 114 people were being treated in hospitals after taking products, including Benikoji Choleste Help meant to lower cholesterol, that contain an ingredient called benikoji, a red species of mold. Earlier in the week, the number of deaths stood at two people.

Some people developed kidney problems after taking the supplements, but the exact cause was still under investigation in cooperation with government laboratories, according to the manufacturer.

…

The company’s products have been recalled — as have dozens of other products that contain benikoji, including miso paste, crackers and a vinegar dressing. Japan’s health ministry put up a list on its official site of all the recalled products, including some that use benikoji for food coloring.

The ministry warned the deaths could keep growing. The supplements could be bought at drug stores without a prescription from a doctor, and some may have been purchased or exported before the recall, including by tourists who may not be aware of the health risks.

Kobayashi Pharmaceutical had been selling benikoji products for years, with a million packages sold over the past three fiscal years, but a problem crept up with the supplements produced in 2023. Kobayashi Pharmaceutical said it produced 18.5 tons of benikoji last year.

Some analysts blame the recent deregulation initiatives, which simplified and sped up approval for health products to spur economic growth.

Note the last line – there has been deregulation initiatives for “health products”. I hope they are rolled back quickly, or this will not be the last time something like this happens in Japan.

Speaking of spices and science

Bharat B. Aggarwal was until recently the leading expert in the curative effects of curcumin.

Bharat B. Aggarwal is an Indian-American biochemist who worked at MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1989 to 2015. His research focused on potential anti-cancer effects and therapeutic applications of herbs and spices. Aggarwal was particularly drawn to curcumin, a non-toxic compound found in turmeric that has long been staple in Ayurvedic systems of medicine. He authored more than 120 articles about the compound from 1994 to 2020. These articles reported that curcumin had therapeutic potential for a variety of diseases, including various cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and, more recently, COVID-19. In his 2011 book Healing Spices: How to Use 50 Everyday and Exotic Spices to Boost Health and Beat Disease, Aggarwal recommends “taking a daily 500 mg curcumin supplement for general health”.

The above quote is from The King of Curcumin: a case study in the consequences of large-scale research fraud

As the title says, it turned out that Aggarwal committed research fraud

MD Anderson Cancer Center initially appeared to be fully on board with Aggarwal’s work. At one point, their website’s FAQ page recommended visitors buy curcumin wholesale from a company for which Aggarwal was a paid speaker (see “Spice Healer”, Scientific American). However, in 2012 (following observations of image manipulation raised by pseudonymous sleuth Juuichi Jigen), MD Anderson Cancer Center launched a research fraud probe against Aggarwal which eventually led to 30 of Aggarwal’s articles being retracted. Only some of these studies were about curcumin specifically, but most concerned similar natural products.

Retractions rarely number this high for a single author; according to the Retraction Watch leaderboard, only 26 other people have authored this many retracted studies. Aggarwal’s retracted articles feature dozens of instances of spliced Western blots and duplicated images, as well as several instances where mice were implanted with tumors exceeding volumes considered ethical. PubPeer commenters have noted irregularities in many publications beyond the 30 that have already been retracted. Aggarwal retired from M.D. Anderson in 2015, but has continued to author articles and appear at conferences.

I predict that more articles will be retracted in the future – not only because of Aggarwal being the author, but also because the field of study seems to be a magnet for frauds

Despite curcumin’s apparent lack of therapeutic promise, the volume of research produced on curcumin grows each year.  More than 2,000 studies involving the compound are published annually. Many of these studies bear signs of fraud and involvement of paper mills. As of 2020, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than 150 million USD funding projects related to curcumin. Funding increased drastically in the 2007 fiscal year, shortly after Aggarwal began to publish in earnest about the compound and the same year he declared curcumin “the Indian solid gold”.

A obvious reason for this is the big money connected to this sort of fraudulent research

This proliferation of research on curcumin has fueled its popularity as a dietary supplement. Grand View Research estimated the global market for curcumin as a pharmaceutical to be around 30 million USD in 2020. Manufacturers are routinely scolded by the United States Food and Drug Administration for making false claims about the health effects of these supplements.

Spices don’t cure cancer

When you look at so-called alternative medicine, one of the remedies that is often pushed is using different spices against different disease, and quite frequently using spice as a cancer cure. Every time anyone have looked into any of these spices as a cure for something, they have of course turned out to be mostly worthless, though a few have turned out to have some effect.

This of course, leads to the claim that spice consumption is an ancient remedy against cancer. Unfortunately, a study from last year has shown that this is not likely to be the case.

No evidence that spice consumption is a cancer prevention mechanism in human populations by Antoine M Dujon et al

Abstract

Background

Why humans historically began to incorporate spices into their diets is still a matter of unresolved debate. For example, a recent study (Bromham et al. There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk. Nat Hum Behav 2021;5:878–91.) did not support the most popular hypothesis that spice consumption was a practice favoured by selection in certain environments to reduce food poisoning, parasitic infections, and foodborne diseases.

Methods

Because several spices are known to have anticancer effects, we explored the hypothesis that natural selection and/or cultural evolution may have favoured spice consumption as an adaptive prophylactic response to reduce the burden of cancer pathology. We used linear models to investigate the potential relationship between age-standardized gastrointestinal cancer rates and spice consumption in 36 countries.

Results

Patterns of spice are not consistent with a cancer mitigation mechanism: the age-standardized rate of almost all gastrointestinal cancers was not related to spice consumption.

Conclusions

Direction other than foodborne pathogens and cancers should be explored to understand the health reasons, if any, why our ancestors developed a taste for spices.

I appropriate the effort to understand why spice was introduced into food in some parts of the world, and am looking forward to future research results

Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense in the Light of Homeopathy

Note: This is a repost from my old blog. It appears at it originally appeared on my old blog.

I am not the first person to state this, but I think that it’s important that we all keep up saying this: Testing of homeopathic medicine should end.

Why do I say this? Well, for a very simple reason: There is no evidence that homeopathy works. And what’s more, the whole concept of homeopathy flies against everything we know about chemistry, physics, and physiology.

This blog post is triggered by a truly abysmal study where homeopathic medicine was compared to proper medicine used for treating moderate to severe depressions – there were numerous flaws in the study (which I plan to address in a later post), but the fundamental problem was that it was comparing medicine with remedies based on nonsense.

There is a famous essay by Theodosius Dobzhansky called “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution“, which goes on to explain how our knowledge of biology wouldn’t make sense except if evolution is true. One could write a similar essay, called say “Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense in the Light of Homeopathy”, in which one explains how all our knowledge of medicine and physiology doesn’t make sense if homeopathy is true.

I don’t think this can be stressed enough.

It’s not just a matter of science not understanding homeopathy. If homeopathy was true, it would mean that the basic building blocks upon which our knowledge is built would be wrong.

Given we know that this is not the case, homeopathy must be wrong. No, that’s too mild; homeopathy must be absolute nonsense.

The basic concepts of homeopathy are things like “like cures like”, miasms, and and the concept of “memory” in water, all of which is nonsense.

“Like cures like” (or law of similars) is the idea that medicine should be based upon things which gives the same symptoms as the original disease. This was perhaps plausible back when Hahnemann first proposed it two hundred years ago, but we now know that there is no truth to this idea. Sometimes the medicine will be based upon substances which gives similar symptoms, but mostly it won’t.

Miasms are an old concept, in which diseases are caused by pollution or bad air. This idea was replaced by the germ theory of diseases, and is not taken serious by anyone except for certain branches of alternative “medicine” such as homeopathy, where they have added their own twists to the concept, but still stay largely true to the old Medieval concept.

The “memory” of water (or sugar for that matter) is the explanation used to explain how homeopathic medicine can have any effect. Homeopathic remedies are based upon the concept of diluting, in which the remedies are diluted to a degree where none of the original molecules are left (see this rather poor Wikipedia article for the numbers).

Oh, and the homeopaths also claim that the more diluted a remedy is, the more potent it is. Yes, this is really what they claim. No, it doesn’t make any sense.

So, all in all, we know that homeopathy doesn’t work. So, why the hell are we continuing to test it against proper medicine?

There are a lot of alternative “medicines” which might work, even if the concepts they are based upon are nonsense (e.g. acupuncture), and it makes sense to test these (so far, the effect of acupuncture seems to be placebo), but this is most certainly not the case with homeopathy. There is no way in which that can work.

Homeopaths might claim otherwise, but then it’s up to them to explain how our basic understanding of chemistry, physics, physiology, and medicine is wrong in this matter, and yet works in every other case. In other words, it’s up to the homeopaths to propose new theories in which homeopathy works, and which still supports our current state of knowledge, and until then, they should be ignored.

Not shunned, but ignored. Like we ignore perpetual motion machine builders, flat-earthers, and other weirdos.

Conventional medicine is not perfect, and our knowledge is expanding all the time, but theories like the germ theory of diseases are well established through science. We understand the mechanisms at play, and this knowledge enables us to fight diseases more efficiently. Much like our understanding of vira has helped us fighting other diseases more efficiently.

Why does claims of memory in water and strength through dilution bring to the table? In what ways are they expanding our knowledge? What diseases are we able to cure because of them? Nothing, none, and none are the answers. So stop bringing them to the table. Instead focus on the many valid ideas, which don’t fly in the face of all the collective knowledge of the sciences.

Woos like to bring up Nobel Laureates Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, and their discovery that ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as an example of how outsiders can turn conventional knowledge on its head.

This is of course pure wishful thinking from their side. Marshall and Warren were very much part of the established scientific community, and while their proposal was received skeptically at first, it was not dismissed out of hand for some very simple reasons:

    • It was built upon evidence.
    • The mechanisms etc. all worked within conventional science and the mechanisms known at the time.
    • There seemed to be some problems with the prevalent hypothesis at the time.

In other words, not only did they work within the established science, they actually addressed some known issues and presented evidence for their claims.

Yes, it took some time (and a very drastic demonstration) to convince people, but the scientific and medical community was very willing to be convinced, and as soon as there were sufficient evidence, the new explanation was universally accepted in quite a short time.

This is how it is done.

So, in what way has proponents of homeopathy done any of this?

The truth is that most people with a basic understanding of science understands that homeopathy is nonsense of the worst order, yet money is still spent on testing this nonsense, demonstrating again and again that it doesn’t work. Why? We know that it doesn’t work, since we understand the fundamental flaws in the premises behind homeopathy, and we know that homeopathic remedies are nothing but water, alcohol, or sugar (depending on whether they are liquid or in pill form), so they cannot work any better than placebo – they ARE placebo.

Let’s put an end to this.

All it does is to lend credibility to homeopathy in the eyes of observers who don’t know any better. They think that since homeopathic remedies are continuously being tested, there must be something to them. Why do we let this misconception continue? Science wins nothing from these sham studies, and it only lends cranks an aura of respectability. Stop it.

Yes, I am very passionate about this – we are allowing a lie to continue perpetually. That’s wrong. Homeopathy has been around for 200 years, providing no value to society as a whole, and generally decreasing the general level of health, and it’s time to stand up and say so.

It goes without saying that I have only contempt for hospitals and doctors who provide homeopathic remedies to their patients. Homeopathic practitioners are usually acting in good faith, believing in their nonsense, but doctors and nurses should know better – they have an education behind them, which provides them with the knowledge necessary to understand what nonsense homeopathy is.