Snake oil

June 29, 2018

We seniors are major users of natural health products: vitamins, minerals, herbal teas, glucosamine, sleep aids, you name it. On every package, you’ll see an eight-digit Natural Product Number (NPN), which means that the product has been authorized and approved for sale by Health Canada’s Natural and Non-prescription Health Products Directorate. So it’s safe and effective, right?

One of my relatives has chronic lymphocytic leukemia. So he was very interested in some recent clinical trials run at the Mayo Clinic (Phase I and Phase II), which showed promising results using high doses of EGCG, an ingredient found in green tea. He contacted the chief investigator, who told him how to run his own trial. He asked a naturopath to recommend a good brand of green tea capsules, bought some at a local health food store, and started taking them. When blood tests showed no significant effect after a few months, he wanted to make sure he was getting enough EGCG. So he took the capsules to a lab. The label on the bottle claims there are 315 mg of EGCG in each capsule. The lab found 39.8 mg of EGCG per capsule – not even 13% of what they claim on the label, and far too little to have any therapeutic effect.

This is no blip. There is virtually no enforcement of quality control for the manufacture and labelling of natural health products in Canada. Furthermore, Health Canada accepts a very weak level of evidence to qualify a natural health product for approval in the first place. For homeopathic products, for example, anecdotal information will do. A few years ago, the CBC TV show, Marketplace, demonstrated just how low the evidence bar is when they created a fake product, called it Nighton (an anagram of Nothing), said it was meant to treat fevers in children, and submitted their application with a few pages photocopied from a 1903 homeopathy text. Yup, it got approved. When Marketplace presented their findings to Health Canada, Health Canada didn’t even apologize; they claimed they were offering consumers choice. What sort of choice do we have when manufacturers can lie on the label? How can we trust any natural health product, when the industry is free to sell snake oil with Health Canada’s blessing?

As for my relative, now he gets his green tea capsules directly from the scientist in Japan who supplied them to the Mayo Clinic. It’s too early to tell whether green tea will help him, but at least he gets to find out.