One of the major reasons behind the passage of DSHEA is that consumers wanted more natural products for their health. They didn’t want to have more new chemical drugs whose long-term safety is still unknown. Chemicals like ephedrine, and other amphetamine-like compounds, whether isolated from nature or synthesized, are not equivalent to the herbs from which they are derived. They are drugs and should be considered and regulated as such, and not as dietary or herbal supplements! Our current law does not distinguish herbs that are used solely to treat illnesses from others that have traditionally been used as foods or tonics. Both can legally be sold as dietary supplements. The former usually have toxic side effects and are meant only for short-term use, while the latter have hundreds or thousands of years of documented safe-use history and have traditionally been used as supplements to our diet. Hence the latter are true herbal supplements while the former are not. The former includes mahuang, ephedrine, N-methyltyramine, synephrine, feverfew, and St. John’s wort; the latter includes tea, ginseng, watercress, licorice, hawthorn, ginger, Job’s tear, lycium, and astragalus.
The above comment is directly lifted from my Newsletter, Issue #13, March/April, 1998 (LCHN-13), now on page 285 of My Life & Rollercoaster Career. It was 21 years ago and 25 years after the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed in 1994. This statement is still true today, 25 years after herbal supplements were created as a new class of herbal products, regulated as food, yet we have been treating (analyzing) them as drugs since day one, requiring them to meet drug standards. How different is this from analyzing pectin in apple and call pectin, apple? Or any ginsenoside in Asian ginseng, and called the chemical, ginseng? I often wonder why few, if any, of the herb or drug experts have ever expressed their opinion on this issue? And we are still making a lot of herbal supplements containing no other herbal elements than standardized chemicals with fillers. I think it’s time to start showing the fingerprints of all herbal products. If the companies don’t do it, we, as consumers, can do it for them so that you can avoid buying their products with dubious identity and quality. My associates and I have all the technical capabilities of starting it. All you have to do is to buy my new books. I am going to apportion 75% of their gross profits to this project.