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InvisibleSimplepowa
In Pursuit of Knowledge


Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 4,310
Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids * 1
    #19311598 - 12/22/13 11:59 AM (10 years, 1 month ago)

When Christopher Herrera, 17, walked into the emergency room at Texas Children’s Hospital one morning last year, his chest, face and eyes were bright yellow — “almost highlighter yellow,” recalled Dr. Shreena S. Patel, the pediatric resident who treated him.

Christopher, a high school student from Katy, Tex., suffered severe liver damage after using a concentrated green tea extract he bought at a nutrition store as a “fat burning” supplement. The damage was so extensive that he was put on the waiting list for a liver transplant.

“It was terrifying,” he said in an interview. “They kept telling me they had the best surgeons, and they were trying to comfort me. But they were saying that I needed a new liver and that my body could reject it.”

New data suggests that his is not an isolated case. Dietary supplements account for nearly 20 percent of drug-related liver injuries that turn up in hospitals, up from 7 percent a decade ago, according to an analysis by a national network of liver specialists. The research included only the most severe cases of liver damage referred to a representative group of hospitals around the country, and the investigators said they were undercounting the actual number of cases.

While many patients recover once they stop taking the supplements and receive treatment, a few require liver transplants or die because of liver failure. Naïve teenagers are not the only consumers at risk, the researchers said. Many are middle-aged women who turn to dietary supplements that promise to burn fat or speed up weight loss.

“It’s really the Wild West,” said Dr. Herbert L. Bonkovsky, the director of the liver, digestive and metabolic disorders laboratory at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, N.C. “When people buy these dietary supplements, it’s anybody’s guess as to what they’re getting.”

Though doctors were able to save his liver, Christopher can no longer play sports, spend much time outdoors or exert himself, lest he strain the organ. He must make monthly visits to a doctor to assess his liver function.

Americans spend an estimated $32 billion on dietary supplements every year, attracted by unproven claims that various pills and powders will help them lose weight, build muscle and fight off everything from colds to chronic illnesses. About half of Americans use dietary supplements, and most of them take more than one product at a time.

Dr. Victor Navarro, the chairman of the hepatology division at Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia, said that while liver injuries linked to supplements were alarming, he believed that a majority of supplements were generally safe. Most of the liver injuries tracked by a network of medical officials are caused by prescription drugs used to treat things like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, he said.

But the supplement business is largely unregulated. In recent years, critics of the industry have called for measures that would force companies to prove that their products are safe, genuine and made in accordance with strict manufacturing standards before they reach the market.

But a federal law enacted in 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, prevents the Food and Drug Administration from approving or evaluating most supplements before they are sold. Usually the agency must wait until consumers are harmed before officials can remove products from stores. Because the supplement industry operates on the honor system, studies show, the market has been flooded with products that are adulterated, mislabeled or packaged in dosages that have not been studied for safety.

The new research found that many of the products implicated in liver injuries were bodybuilding supplements spiked with unlisted steroids, and herbal pills and powders promising to increase energy and help consumers lose weight.

“There unfortunately are criminals that feel it’s a business opportunity to spike some products and sell them as dietary supplements,” said Duffy MacKay, a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group. “It’s the fringe of the industry, but as you can see, it is affecting some consumers.” More popular supplements like vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fish oil had not been linked to “patterns of adverse effects,” he said.

The F.D.A. estimates that 70 percent of dietary supplement companies are not following basic quality control standards that would help prevent adulteration of their products. Of about 55,000 supplements that are sold in the United States, only 170 — about 0.3 percent — have been studied closely enough to determine their common side effects, said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an expert on dietary supplements.

“When a product is regulated, you know the benefits and the risks and you can make an informed decision about whether or not to take it,” he said. “With supplements, you don’t have efficacy data and you don’t have safety data, so it’s just a black box.”

Since 2008, the F.D.A. has been taking action against companies whose supplements are found to contain prescription drugs and controlled substances, said Daniel Fabricant, the director of the division of dietary supplement programs in the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. For example, the agency recently took steps to remove one “fat burning” product from shelves, OxyElite Pro, that was linked to one death and dozens of cases of hepatitis and liver injury in Hawaii and other states.

The new research, presented last month at a conference in Washington, was produced by the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, which was established by the National Institutes of Health to track patients who suffer liver damage from certain drugs and alternative medicines. It includes doctors at eight major hospitals throughout the country.

The investigators looked at 845 patients with severe, drug-induced liver damage who were treated at hospitals in the network from 2004 to 2012. It focused only on cases where the investigators ruled out other causes and blamed a drug or a supplement with a high degree of certainty.

When the network began tracking liver injuries in 2004, supplements accounted for 7 percent of the 115 severe cases. But the percentage has steadily risen, reaching 20 percent of the 313 cases recorded from 2010 to 2012.

Those patients included dozens of young men who were sickened by bodybuilding supplements. The patients all fit a similar profile, said Dr. Navarro, an investigator with the network.

“They become very jaundiced for long periods of time,” he said. “They itch really badly, to the point where they can’t sleep. They lose weight. They lose work. I had one patient who was jaundiced for six months.”

Tests showed that a third of the implicated products contained steroids not listed on their labels.

A second trend emerged when Dr. Navarro and his colleagues studied 85 patients with liver injuries linked to herbal pills and powders. Two-thirds were middle-aged women, on average 48 years old, who often used the supplements to lose weight or increase energy. Nearly a dozen of those patients required liver transplants, and three died.

It was not always clear what the underlying causes of injury were in those cases, in part because patients frequently combined multiple supplements and used products with up to 30 ingredients, said Dr. Bonkovsky, an investigator with the network.

But one product that patients used frequently was green tea extract, which contains catechins, a group of potent antioxidants that reputedly increase metabolism. The extracts are often marketed as fat burners, and catechins are often added to weight-loss products and energy boosters. Most green tea pills are highly concentrated, containing many times the amount of catechins found in a single cup of green tea, Dr. Bonkovsky said. In high doses, catechins can be toxic to the liver, he said, and a small percentage of people appear to be particularly susceptible.

But liver injuries attributed to herbal supplements are more likely to be severe and to result in liver transplants, Dr. Navarro said. And unlike prescription drugs, which are tightly regulated, dietary supplements typically carry no information about side effects. Consumers assume they have been studied and tested, Dr. Bonkovsky said. But that is rarely the case. “There is this belief that if something is natural, then it must be safe and it must be good,” he said.



NYTimes
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied-to-dietary-aids.html


--------------------
Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

---

Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."

---

Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."


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OfflineKingKnowledge
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Registered: 03/30/13
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Re: Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids [Re: Simplepowa]
    #19312122 - 12/22/13 02:29 PM (10 years, 1 month ago)

I'm quite confused.

Green tea extract did this? I've taken the stuff before, as well as raspberry ketones, and its hard to believe this is possible.

EGCG (active ingredient in green tea) is not harmful until RIDICULOUS doses are taken.

I'm sure some fatburners are bad for you (obviously some of you have read the same things I have about jack3d and other preworkouts/fatburners killing people). But EGCG? Nah.


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OfflineCaddilac
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Registered: 11/19/13
Posts: 469
Loc: WY. Flag
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Re: Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids [Re: Simplepowa]
    #19312129 - 12/22/13 02:31 PM (10 years, 1 month ago)

Bout to try Penatropin for Male enhancement. Made by a Harvard grad and Doctor of Celebrities. It's gotta be good. On the supplemental note, amino acids and non essential amino acids _ Good right? Shaping the body is the way to go using the best information you can will inform your decision z . Could this lead to supplement regulation?


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OfflineKingKnowledge
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Registered: 03/30/13
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Re: Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids [Re: Caddilac]
    #19312136 - 12/22/13 02:32 PM (10 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

Caddilac said:
Bout to try Penatropin for Male enhancement. Made by a Harvard grad and Doctor of Celebrities. It's gotta be good. On the supplemental note, amino acids and non essential amino acids _ Good right? Shaping the body is the way to go using the best information you can will inform your decision z . Could this lead to supplement regulation?





LOL! I don't know about penatropin...

but amino acids are great for you. BCAA's all the way.


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Invisibledurian_2008
Cornucopian Eating an Elephant
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Registered: 04/02/08
Posts: 16,685
Loc: Raccoon City
Re: Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids [Re: KingKnowledge]
    #19312694 - 12/22/13 05:02 PM (10 years, 1 month ago)

Amino acids, in general, are said to have a higher glycemic index than table sugar, and some do cause deadly side effects, particularly in respect to fluid balance in extreme heat.

I appreciate that someone would have to go to extremes, in order to achieve extreme results, but I defy anyone to tell me that they eat well, live an active lifestyle -- especially raising these actual plants in useful quantities -- and still have body image issues, no matter what you look like.


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InvisibleSimplepowa
In Pursuit of Knowledge


Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 4,310
Re: Spike in Harm to Liver Is Tied to Dietary Aids [Re: durian_2008]
    #19315303 - 12/23/13 09:00 AM (10 years, 1 month ago)

How can proteins/amino acid have a higher glycemic score than glucose? I mean, glycemic levels are calculated only with glucose, not with anything else, amino acid doesn't play for nothing here when looking at that glycemic index.

Even when the liver do neoglucogenesis from glucogenic amino acid it wouldn't change much the blood sugar level... it would likely stabilize it at 4-4,5mmol (normal being 5 mmol).

Do you all understand what amino acid are?

Proteins are made from amino acid. There are 20 standards that exists and different chains sequence of amino acid have different 3D conformations giving the proprieties of x or y protein. Some amino acids are essential (we are not able to create them endogenously) and some are not essential because we synthesize them ourselves.

There is no deadly side effect from them, what is this statement?! I mean when you eat an egg, you digest the protein in dipeptide and tripeptide for absorption and then the liver decide if you need them or not. If not, they are metabolized into urea or NH3 and you piss them. That's it and that's all. There is no toxicity associated with certain amino acid? Or maybe I just never got that but I would need some sources of information or something?

Without amino acids you wouldn't be alive today. Proteins are what makes us what we are currently. They are a vast part of your body with lipid and sugars and you can't live without them, I can promise it to you.


--------------------
Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

---

Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."

---

Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."


Edited by Simplepowa (12/23/13 09:06 AM)


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