http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2013/08/06/bodybuilding-steroids-dont-belong-in-vitamin-products/Consumers often expect vitamins to work miracles for their health. But if you’re a woman taking a vitamin B supplement, the last things you might expect are your voice growing lower, your hair thinning out or growing oddly, and your menstrual cycle stopping.
That’s why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a July 26th warning that a B vitamin product sold from a one-woman Long Island supplement company contained two anabolic, or bodybuilding, steroid drugs. One, methasterone, is regulated as a Schedule III controlled substance while the other, dimethazine, can be metabolized to generate two molecules of a methasterone derivative.
Methasterone is one of a series of steroids initially synthesized in the 1950s by Syntex, now part of Roche, but it never reached the market. Depending on the dose taken, anabolic steroids can cause liver damage, blood clots, muscle pain, masculinizing effects in women and, in men, testicular shrinkage, infertility, and breast enlargement. The latter effect, also known as gynecomastia, results from the body’s compensatory effect against too much androgen; that’s why bodybuilders often use aromatase inhibitors to prevent such feedback effects of estrogen synthesis (Yes, men, we make estrogen as well.).
Purity First Health Products owner Candice M. Tripp initially chose to ignore FDA recommendations to voluntarily recall the B vitamin product, destroy any remaining stock, and to warn consumers about potential risks of injury. Delthia Ricks reports in Newsday that Tripp, “believes the situation with her product is part of a government ploy to drive small vitamin-makers out of business.”
Voluntary recall of offending products by dietary supplement marketers is the most typical response to FDA warning letters are the most common way that adulterated supplements are taken out of circulation. Companies that resist what are these FDA-ruled violations of the Federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act are subject to, “legal action including, without limitation, seizure, injunction, and/or criminal prosecution.”
But legal proceedings don’t help the acute problem of getting potentially dangerous products off the market. Dr. Daniel Fabricant, Director of FDA’s Office of Dietary Supplements recently wrote at FDA Voice that the agency used its expanded administrative detention authority to prevent distribution of a supplement containing DMAA, an amphetamine derivative often added illegally to weight loss supplements.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2013/08/06/bodybuilding-steroids-dont-belong-in-vitamin-products/
