My thanks to Nutrition Action Health Letter for their informative article on supplement advertising. The article points out 10 advertising claims that usually have little or no substantiation. These are in no particular order:

1. Pharmacist Recommended – especially if the pharmacist works for you as they do in the Rite-Aid/GNC alliance.

2. Doctor Recommended – Take a look at the example of the head of Dermatology in a large hospital in California. She Recommended a product in an infomercial that she had never used but was paid $5000 to endorse.

3. Available with out a prescription – all supplements and vitamins are available without prescriptions and never needed a prescription to purchase them.

4. Patented – medications don’t have to be effective to be patented. Some of them are never marketed because they don’t meet medical standards, but supplements can be patented without knowing their efficacy. Certainly they are patented, but that is no guarantee of effectiveness.

5. Proven by clinical studies – Read below on my research on one supplement. They don’t say anything false, they just don’t tell the whole truth.

6. As seen on TV – If the ingredient has ever been mentioned on a reputable TV program, the company selling a product with this ingredient might claim “as seen on …”.

7. Most Powerful – says who? This claim is made by all the products in a single category and it is simply their opinion.

8. Infomercials don’t mean effective – Remember the dermatologist above? Go to the article I referenced and read about infomercials on page 3.

9. Meets FDA advice for choosing supplements – the FDA advises that manufacturers may make claims that are tenuous or hard to support statistically. I go into this further in my analysis on a glucosamine supplement.

10. Shown in laboratory studies – Whose laboratory studies. The use of the word laboratory is a way to make it seem as though science is involved rather than just marketing.

My experience in searching for these claims turned up a product that used almost all of these techniques. I used Google to do a search. The terms I entered were – “Pharmacist recommended” supplement. I only used quotes as you see them here.

The product that appeared on the front page of my search was Cosamin DS. It is manufactured by Nutramax Laboratories Inc. Nutramax purchases its trademarked brand of chondroitin from Bioberica, a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Spain that makes Nutramax Lab’s low molecular weight chondroitin.

The first claim made by Nutramax about Cosamin DS is that no other product has the exclusive ingredient used in the NIH GAIT (Glucosamine/Chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial) study. The advertisment even provides a link to the NIH site that answers questions about the study. The answer to who provided the source materials shows that Bioiberica, SA, Barcelona Spain supplied the chondroitin sulfate. No mention is made of “low molecular weight” which is part of the trademark for Nutramax Lab’s brand of chondroitin. Other products do have this supplement in them but are sold in other countries or in veterinary products. Nutramax Lab’s claim that the GAIT study showed patients had improvement in their pain is taken out of context. Below is copy and pasted information from the study results posted on line.

• Participants taking the positive control, celecoxib, experienced statistically significant pain relief versus placebo–about 70 percent of those taking celecoxib had a 20 percent or greater reduction in pain versus about 60 percent for placebo.
• Overall, there were no significant differences between the other treatments tested and placebo.
• For a subset of participants with moderate-to-severe pain, glucosamine combined with chondroitin sulfate provided statistically significant pain relief compared with placebo–about 79 percent had a 20 percent or greater reduction in pain versus about 54 percent for placebo. According to the researchers, because of the small size of this subgroup these findings should be considered preliminary and need to be confirmed in further studies.
• For participants in the mild pain subset, glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate together or alone did not provide statistically significant pain relief.

What are Cosamin DS supplements claims:

#1 recommended supplement by pharmacists and doctors

Contains and exclusively researched compound and the exclusive compound used by the NIH in the GAIT study (Bioiberica gave its chondroitin to the NIH! The company supplying glcosamine did also. Pfizer sold its product to the NIH)

Its compounds are trademarked

Only chondroitin product proven effective at relieving joint pain. – see highlights above

The company uses an FDA consumer pamphlet to say it meets all the advice using the data provided above

It appears that Cosamin DS is probably one of the better supplements of its type but it probably is no better than placebo at relieving pain and healing arthritis.

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