Invisible Ingredients

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Invisible Ingredients

February 8, 2002

While the rest of America's top amateur athletes gear up for the Salt Lake

City Olympics this weekend, two champion bobsledders will watch from the

sidelines -- unfairly disqualified, they claim, as an indirect result of the

political maneuverings of an industry that counts Utah as one of its prime

bases.

The sledders, disqualified after testing positive for steroid use, insist

they never knowingly took any banned substances. They had, however, been

taking performance-enhancing herbal supplements which contained steroids --

a fact they claimed not to know, because the supplements' labels don't

mention it.

The lax labelling is no accident. The $15.7 billion US supplement industry,

$3 billion of which is based in Utah, has lobbied hard and spent heavily to

keep labelling laws light. The industry's main champion is Sen. Orrin Hatch,

a Utah Republican who led the charge for the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health

and Education Act, effectively quashing reformers' efforts to subject

dietary supplements to Food and Drug Administration regulations and

nutritional labelling laws imposed on most foods. That year, the industry

doled out over $400,000 in campaign contributions -- $64,000 of which went

to Hatch.

This week, two herbal supplements made by a California company were recalled

from store shelves after they were found to contain prescription drugs --

one a powerful blood thinner, and the other alprazolam, better known under

the brand name Xanax. Those incidents appear to have been manufacturing

accidents, but thanks to the industry's efforts, supplement consumers still

have no way of knowing whether they are unintentionally ingesting chemicals

that could do a lot more to them than keep them out of a bobsledding race.

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