. . . this silly article will scare some people into injuring their health Every so often the otherwise commendable Consumer Reports (CR) goes on an uncharacteristic rant about vitamins that is marked by ignorance, extreme bias, distortion of the facts and downright mean-spiritedness. In the new “Vitamins and Supplements, 10 Dangers That May Surprise You,” they’re at it again. The first “surprising danger” they cite is that “supplements are not risk-free.”  Well, no surprise there. Few things are completely risk free. The supplement industry has more than its share of charlatans and amateurs. But CR lumps everyone together, blaming all supplements it seems for the 6,300 supplement-related reports to the government’s Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) in the last 4 years, including 115 deaths. Now, although half the US population takes supplements, there hasn’t been a single death from vitamins in the last 27 years. Many of these adverse events and deaths have had to do with…

. . . but it’s just one more cost of doing business When GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) paid the government a record $3 billion last July in settlement of numerous violations of the False Claims Act (FCA), including concealing data on fatal cardiovascular side effects of their diabetes drug Avandia, it was just business as usual. In fact, Sidney M. Wolfe, MD, of Public Citizen, reports that on the heels of the huge pay-out’s announcement, GSK’s stock price rose to a near 52-week high. Investors knew that even billion-dollar fines are a drop in the bucket compared to the multi billion-dollar profits enjoyed by the drug industry. According to the US Department of Justice, the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest defrauder of the federal government under the FCA, as measured by the size of civil and criminal settlements reached yearly. Consumer advocate organization Public Citizen, which has been tracking fines paid by Big Pharma, found that the amounts of these fines have been escalating…