Aaron Hartman, MD, warns that many over-the-counter supplements are poorly vetted and contaminated with heavy metals like lead and mercury, or spiked with undeclared medications. A federal testing database found adulteration in over a thousand products. Upcoming episodes cover specific risks like melatonin toxicity in children and vitamin D.
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Is your supplement hurting you or helping you? Where are you getting your supplements from? Do you even know what's in them? Have they been evaluated? And did you know? There's a high possibility these things can be tainted with lead mercury. They could be doped with different medications to help get quote, unquote effects. Were you aware of that? I'd like to talk about this over this next series of different blogs and webinars and whatnot so people can start to realize that supplements can supplement. And as a physician, the very first thing we're supposed to do is no harm. Which means if we're going to recommend something like a vitamin D to help with your immune system, we're going to recommend something to help with your gut function. At the very least, it should do no harm. However, it's kind of like the Wild west. When you buy things over the counter and they haven't been vetted and tested, you really are taking things into your own hands. So the next series of episodes. What I want to do is talk about these issues. Now. What are my references? When I talk about something this personal, this deep? The average person in the country right now is taking some kind of supplement. So this hits home for a lot of people. What are my references? The first one of the references I use is a place called Consumer Labs. Consumer Labs. They are the consumer reports of the supplement world. They go out and find supplements, test them to find out if they have what they say they have in them and if there's other things in there. The other thing is the fda. The FDA seems like a reasonable place to go. However, the FDA typically only looks at medications, so they're not the best source because they don't look at all supplements. But if they are putting something out there, you know, it's gotta be a big issue. There's other resources from PubMed, which is the database for research in our country. It's where I go to get stuff and where physicians and scientists go to pull articles offline. These are the kind of resources I'm using now for those of you who are skeptical, which is good. Those of you who want to go a deeper dive. The articles I'm including and I'm kind of referencing here will all be below every one of these videos. Every one of these blogs will have them all there. And there's even a resource that actually looks for from the federal government that looks and tests and actually has a database of over a thousand things have been tested to show what they're adulterated with. So this is a big deal. And I want to educate everybody about so you know more about it. So what's the first principle to think about when using a supplement? The very first is first do no harm. At the very minimum, if three, four or five years from now, I say fish oil doesn't work, I say vitamin D doesn't work, I want to at least know that no harm was done, meaning you didn't get other things that can hurt you. The second thing is when you say you're taking something, you want to know that what's on the label is actually in the product, which is one of the topics we'll talk about. And then you want to make sure there's nothing extra added in there over and beyond what's supposed to be in there. We'll talk a little later on about melatonin and the increased incidence of actually kids pediatric patients becoming toxic with too much melatonin for products. So these are some of the topics we'll be talking about with the next several series. So join me Share it. This is a big issue because the average American is using some kind of supplement. At the very minimum, you want to do no harm. So we're going to hop into it and start this series. I'm excited about sharing this information with you. One of the purposes of Richmond Integrative Functional Medicine is to educate, encourage and empower. This is part of the education that encourages you to make the right decisions and empowers you to do them. One of the things we also do for all of our patients is we vet a lot of supplements. We actually vet everything we recommend for patients and we have resources on our website for those who want to go to places where procs are already vetted for you. So we're going to start begin. I'm really excited to be able to share this information with you.
