This blog may aid digestion.
I was eating a cup of yogurt this morning, and noticed that the label claimed that the product “may” help your digestive system. Let me ask you a question: If you saw a headache medicine which said “may relieve headache symptoms,” would you buy it? Obviously I bought the yogurt because I like to eat yogurt. But this brings up an important topic which seem to slip by most grocery shoppers.
Be aware of the fact that pseudoscience is cropping up in nearly every aisle of your local supermarket. If the advertising uses phrases like “ancient Chinese believed” or “it is said that” or “may contribute to,” understand that what they are selling is not regulated by the FDA, and is using that vague language because it is prohibited by law from making health claims. In some cases these are untested products. In other cases they have been tested and been proven not to provide the health benefits their advocates claim.
Also, do not assume that a product advertised as “natural” is necessarily good for you, or the implication that something not “100% natural” is necessarily harmful. Arsenic is natural. Don’t eat it. Drugs which allow doctors to cure diseases and prolong life were developed in a lab. They are good. A commonly overlooked fact is that herbs and vitamins are, in fact, drugs. Just because something says “herbal remedy” on the package doesn’t mean that you should take that for your illness instead of going to a doctor who actually studied for years to help you. The difference between the drugs your doctor prescribes and the stuff in those herbs is that the prescription drug has been exhaustively tested in many studies before they were allowed to sell it to you, and the dosage of the active ingredient has been precisely measured. When someone pulls some plant out of the ground and grinds it up and you ingest it, there’s no way of telling what dosage you’re getting, what else is in it, or what actual effects (desirable or undesirable) you will experience — if any at all.
The point is to remember to be skeptical. You know full well that you shouldn’t take car advertisements at face value, and you check prices in more than one store when you’re ready to buy a new TV. The same diligence is even more called for when it comes to your health.
July 20th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Headache medicine’s purpose is to relieve headaches. Yogurt’s purpose is not to aid digestion. (Does yogurt really have a purpose?) And I believe if you buy an herbal remedy from a store, they do give you dosage information, because most herbs can be dangerous if you take too much of them, just like lab-developed medicines.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Rebecca,
Thanks for joining in the conversation! I think your first point (correct me if I’m wrong) is that it’s okay if yogurt doesn’t really aid in digestion because it’s just a snack food, and headache medicine should be held to a different standard because it’s marketed as a drug. I agree, except in this case the product has a health claim on the label. If it just said “yummy yogurt,” I would have devoured it and moved on. I think that if it makes a health claim at all, it should prove it and say “aids digestion” instead of saying what it “may” do.
On your second point, instructions such as “do not exceed four pills daily” do not give dosage information. I haven’t seen any herbal products which tell you how many milligrams of the drug are in each dose. But my main argument with these products is that they can’t even honestly (or legally) claim to treat the malady they are specifically marketed to treat, because the evidence is against them or doesn’t even exist.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Careful what you say about doctors and being schooled in the art of medicating. There are many times doctors could offer more “natural” solutions to medical problems but cannot because their medical education is not diverse enough to include those options. Most doctors are bribed by the almighty pharmaceutical companies to push their drugs.
…yogurt may aid in digestion… Maybe they should have said “Yogurt will aid in your digestion if your intestinal flora has been disrupted due to a piss poor diet or large amounts of antibiotics.” (maybe without the “piss”). Yogurt “may” help your digestive tract. It does restore the good flora in your intestines. Is that the only reason why someone’s digestive tract would require “aid”??? nope.
Based on this comment you might think I don’t agree with you, however, I do. Unfortunately, many doctors are power/money happy and many people are drug happy/stupid. Marketing people know this, and they do their jobs, whether moral or immoral, and exploit it.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Mike,
It’s absolutely true that developing and marketing drugs is a business, and that salesmen encourage doctors to prescribe their product instead of a competing product. There may be some ethical issues there, but I think that your comments imply that the doctors are prescribing those drugs instead of more “natural” remedies because they either don’t know about the alternatives or are just greedy. This is obviously a misunderstanding of the way science works.
1. If a technique, drug (including herb), etc. is proven to do what its proponents claim and doesn’t have risks serious enough to be unacceptable in the medical community, that treatment becomes part of medicine. If it is unproven, no doctor who values his license will prescribe it to patients. There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. There’s stuff we know works, and stuff we don’t know works. We test the stuff we don’t know. If it works, we use it. If it doesn’t, we don’t. Those who continue to use and defend it after it has been shown not to work are quacks.
2. Even if a doctor accepted an outright bribe to prescribe a specific drug, he would be prescribing that drug to a patient instead of a competing drug. He wouldn’t prescribe it as an alternative to something from the patient’s own garden which was a “secret natural treatment.”
3. If the pharmaceutical industry and doctors were in a secret conspiracy to prevent the spread of “natural,” effective solutions which weren’t making the drug companies money, there is no way on earth it could be kept quiet.
4. I have never heard of a doctor working for free to help the poor who would ever turn down modern treatments in favor of some “natural” remedy if they had access to the proven stuff.
Based on this comment you may think I’m calling you a fool, but I’m not in the least. The simple fact is that many of the issues argued about regularly are way too complex to be understood without knowing things the average person does not know. Taken at face value, the statements you made seem to show that your conclusion makes perfect sense. However, once you know a few more facts, a new, incompatible story emerges.
July 24th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Thanks for the interesting blog entry and comments.
One small correction, you said herbs and vitamins are drugs. Herbs are, vitamins are not. By definition they are substances your body needs for certain biochemical reactions but cannot make for itself, so must be consumed. We should have different regulation for drugs and true supplements - although herbs are drugs, and I think that all health claims should require evidence.
There is no good evidence of yogurt cultures aid in digestion or have any health benefit. The intestinal flora is complex, and replacing it with a single bacterial species does not seem to help it. Here’s a good summary from quackcast: http://www.quackcast.com/QuackCast/Podcasts/F66B0A0B-C005-481D-A168-8D9CF22D5094.html
The notion that doctors do not understand nutrition, so-called “natural” remedies, and that they are bribed by big pharma is nothing more than an unsupported assertion. It’s a convenient way to dismiss evidence that does not support one’s views. The standard of care evolves in health care and is driven by evidence, research, and salaried academics. There is quite a bit of non-industry research paid for by the NIH and other institutions.
Probiotics is a good example. There is no conspiracy here. The simple fact is that the theory and evidence behind probiotics are very weak.
July 24th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Many doctors prescribe newer drugs when older generics are available not because the newer drugs are better, but because they get something out of it. Nexium and Prilosec are perfect examples. Nexium’s formula is a tiny bit different then Nexium. It had about a 2% higher success rate in their test groups then Prilosec. This was enough for them to market the drug as a different product. This all right before the generic for Prilosec was legally allowed to be released (coincidentally). The doctors know this info and they prescribe Nexium which is more expensive for people and their insurance companies. If they didn’t prescribe it, it wouldn’t exist. I don’t know why they do it, but someone is being greedy and unethical and it looks like the doctors are the only people who could stop it.
I don’t believe in natural remedies untested by the FDA. I did not mean to imply that. I believe in natural solutions. I believe it is healthier to use organic foods rather than non organic foods. I believe I would rather try eating yogurt or taking probiotics to slow diarrhea (which is tested by myself to work on myself) then a prescribed medication proven to work, but causes severe stomach cramps in a small percentage of the people. Steven Novella, you can not tell me yogurt is actually doing nothing for me. Quakcast also can not tell me that. That’s because the human body is NOT fully understood and everyone is different. Maybe you can both tell the hospital down the street who gives the elderly probiotics to aid their digestion that they’re wrong too.
I like to keep chemists out of my food. Things are added to foods to make them more inexpensive or convenient to make. Genetic engineering, steroids in animals, etc. Some of this stuff is new and no one knows the long term side effects. WE are the test subjects. The long term test results won’t be known until we hit 80 years old.
A natural solution is to try not drinking caffeine before bed if you have trouble sleeping instead of taking a sleeping pill. If your ankles hurt because you weigh 400 pounds, lose weight, don’t take pain medicine. Although the commercials suggest changing your diet before taking Nexium as a side note, most doctors do not put enough emphasis on the “natural solution”. Doctors don’t always know the “possible” natural solutions because the FDA does not test them and the majority of people no longer practice them. This is why doctors are greedy and people are stupid.
There are many “naturalists” that are also greedy, but I was talking about doctors. If you have seen a natural food store you already know this. There is a cure for everything there. People buy this stuff, because as a whole, people are stupid and impatient, etc…
Shawn, yogurt “may aid in digestion” just like Cialis “may cause very low blood pressure, possibly resulting in dizziness, fainting, stroke, or heart attack.”
I’m not being mean, I just feel very strong about the amount of profit made off the misfortune of others.
As much as we all want it to be, the human body will never be cut and dry… at least in our lifetimes.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Mike,
I agree with the “natural” remedies like your examples of losing weight to ease ankle pain and avoiding caffeine in an attempt to fall asleep at night. And in an earlier reply to you I conceded that some doctors may be prescribing some drugs in favor of other drugs for less-than-ethical reasons.
I did argue that doctors were not prescribing them rather than herbs or whatever, but I have no reason to disagree with your assertion that a lot of doctors seem to prefer to write prescriptions rather than spend a lot of time educating their patients. Unfortunately some of that may be due to greed, high patient loads resulting in inadequate time spent with each, or indifference. But I think some of it also comes from a demand from the patients for a quick fix, and the fear that telling a patient that they are responsible for their own problems (obesity, alcoholism, excessive caffeine consumption) because they are worried about losing patients to a doctor who isn’t so “judgemental.” In any case, I think that it would be a mistake for anyone to make a claim about all doctors, or even a majority of them, based on the behavior of a minority which make themselves very noticeable by doing these things.
Dr. Novella did mention that yogurt is good for treating diarrhea an episode or two ago in his podcast (my review here: http://milocast.com/?p=7), but he did not address that specific point in his comment above. I think his blanket comment about probiotics was regarding the more common claims about treating fungal infections and other intestinal issues, but I’m sure that he’ll clarify if you contact him directly, or maybe he’ll reply again to this thread.
It sounds like we agree much more than we disagree. Thanks for the interesting contributions to this discussion.