the quackometer

Julian Graves: Not Just Nuts - Dangerously Irresponsible

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

So. Today. I had a quite jaw dropping conversation in my local branch of Julian Graves. For my American readers, Julian Graves is a shop that sells large bags of nuts, seeds, dried fruit, food ingredients and confectionery. I quite like them. Low on packaging, low on branding, and excellent value for money for kitchen basics. And they are not too puritanical in their outlook. You can buy enough liquorice allsorts, for a couple of pounds, to make a family of six sick.

But passing their window, I see a big stack of jars (pictured left) on offer at half price for £3.49, containing a quarter of a kilogram of bitter apricot kernels. The label contains a dire warning not to eat more than 2 in 24 hours. How odd! Now, some spices are not good for you if you eat large amounts: nutmeg springs to mind. But these kernels are not a spice. What are they selling this for? It hardly looks edible to me.

So, I walk in and as the shop assistant what these bitter apricot kernels were for. She responded straight away, "They are good for some sorts of cancer". OMFG!

Is that all? Apparently, yes. They are not food - they are far too bitter to eat. What is more, the disclaimer is there because they produce amounts of cyanide when eaten. Eat too many at one go and it will be your last visit to Julian Graves and that is not too good for repeat sales.

I am not too sure about the legality of this conversation. The Cancer Act of 1939 says "No person shall take any part in the publication of any advertisement containing an offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof." As this was a conversation, maybe it falls outside this act. I return home and check on the Julian Graves website about what they say. It is worth repeating their page in full...

You have been requesting them in your hundreds and now they are available online and in stores.

We are the first UK retailer to sell this controversial product which many people believe may offer significant health benefits.

The kernels, seeds of the apricot fruit, are one of the highest sources of vitamin B17 - also known as laetrile -which, it is alleged, may help protect the immune system.

But the kernels have a very bitter aftertaste and can be toxic if eaten in large amounts. Yet, as more data becomes available – particularly on the net – about the benefits of vitamin B17, people will probably be willing to accept the bitter taste in the belief that these kernels may help maintain their health.

But it's important to stress that - to date - no medical or scientific research has been carried out on the kernels so their 'perceived' benefits cannot be proven in any way.

As a responsible retailer, we do not make any claims about the product’s ‘alleged’ powers. All we can do is make them available and ensure the potential problem of eating too many in one go is highlighted.

We strongly recommend that if people want to know more about bitter apricot kernels and vitamin B17, they should go online and do their own research.

They end with the statement,

If you firmly believe in the power of bitter apricot kernels, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at snacks@juliangraves.co.uk

Staggering stuff.

Where do we start? The most obvious thing is that there is no such thing as vitamin B17. A vitamin is a nutrient that the body requires in tiny amounts. B17 is sometimes called laetrile. This compound was called Vitamin B17 by an Ernst T. Krebs who claimed it was a vitamin, mostly so that it could be sold as a food supplement and avoid medicine laws. He claimed cancer was caused by a lack of 'B17'. Laetrile is pretty big stuff in the USA with many alternative medicine hucksters offering it in one form another. The web is chockablock with misinformation and wild claims about the stuff. This makes the Julian Graves request to " should go online and do their own research" pretty despicable.

What do reliable resources say about laetrile? The Cochrane Review says,

RESULTS: No RCTs or non-RCTs were found, so no abstraction of outcome data could be performed in this systematic review AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: The claim that Laetrile has beneficial effects for cancer patients is not supported by data
from controlled clinical trials.

Bandolier at Oxford come to a similar conclusion,

The bottom line is that there is no conclusive evidence of efficacy, but considerable evidence of toxicity, especially that associated with cyanide poisoning.

Cancer Research UK give warnings to cancer sufferers,

Your doctor may tell you that there are no further conventional cancer treatments available that could cure your cancer. But treatments to control your symptoms are still possible. The news that your cancer can’t be cured is very difficult to accept. And in this situation, many people consider alternative therapies, including laetrile.

There isn’t enough proof that laetrile is an effective treatment for cancer or any other disease. Most of the websites promoting laetrile base their claims on unsupported opinions and anecdotal evidence.

Their web site is full of sensible advice on this quackery.

Julian Graves have previously got into trouble over selling apricot kernels. The Food Standards Agency stepped in previously to stop their sale as there was no warning that eating only a small handful could potentially be fatal. The Daily Mail reported,

The chain pulled them in line with FSA advice but would start selling them again with a revised dosage recommendation if the food watchdog gave it permission to do so.

Has the FSA allowed them to sell this dangerous and useless product? The product is not just dangerous because of the cyanide poisoning thing, but it allows desperate people to engage with dangerous web healing fantasies. There is no other use for this product and Julian Graves appears to be happy to assist.

A few weeks ago Julian Graves was acquired by American pharmaceutical company NBTY after troubled Icelandic conglomerate Baugur sold them on. Their CEO, Scott Rudolph, said,

The acquisition of Julian Graves is an integral part of NBTY's strategic plan to enhance its position as the number one supplement retailer in the UK and gain geater market share. We continue to seek acquisitions which generate growth and further entrench NBTY as the worldwide leader in the nutritional supplement industry.

Julian Graves has not really been big on 'health' supplements up til now. NBTY already own Holland and Barrett and GNC in the UK. They dominate the industry of useless pills that trade of web rumours for their effectiveness. A few dayas ago I speculated they might be interested in troubled UK supplement pill pushers Neutrahealth. I think we can be expecting to see a lot more irresponsible supplement nonsense in the shop that used to sell chocolate covered banana chips.

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Follow up

We hear back from JG about how they justify the sale of this poisonous fruit food waste cancer quackery cure:
Julian Graves' Mendacious Defence of Cancer Quackery

Northern Doctor writes about what eating apricot kernels can do to you.

Labels: Holland and Barrett, Julian Graves, NBTY, vitamins

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Natural Disasters, Corporate Nutrition and the Confusopoly of Diet

Sunday, January 20, 2008

The louder a food screams 'natural' or 'healthy' at you, the further you should run. That is the somewhat counter-intuitive message of Michael Pollan's essay, Unhappy Meals. Pollan tells us to avoid those food products that come bearing loud health claims.

They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

Indeed, as you push your trolley around the supermarket, the silent spring onions and the mute mangos are made to look positively unhealthy in the din of competing yells of naturalness and healthiness of the more processed products deeper in the store. We even have Diet Coke Plus Antioxidant now with a "hint of real green tea and antioxidant Vitamin C."

Of course the loudest of the health screaming foods are the most processed of them all - the food supplements. Pollan argues that our obsession with health removes an important sense of joy from food. Vitamins and supplements take this to an extreme. Supplements are food stripped naked, hosed down and dressed in orange jump suits. Their salesmen, like Patrick Holford, promise huge life optimising benefits from this reductionist and sciencey attitude to food. Michael Pollan argues against this self-centred and irrational approach and implores us to reject 'dietary nutrients' and embrace instead good 'dietary habits'. His manifesto is to return to communal meals, to take "serious pleasure in eating", to eat traditional diets as found in France, Japan or the Mediteranean, and to have "small portions, no seconds or snacking". In short, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. "

The antithesis of this approach is best found in health shops like Holland and Barrett. These shops scream their caring, green, healthy credentials at you. But when you step inside you are confronted with joyless superfood ingredients and huge rows of tubs of chemicals in pill form that imply all sorts of health enhancements. Their claims are not made in store - that might prove problematic. Health food shops rely on the 'health food' books and web sites that are little more than infomercials for this strange business. But people want to 'take control of their health' and flock to these stores on a promise of longer, better and thinner lives. And more than this, if you do have a health problem, then people like Patrick Holford are telling you that food can be better medicine than drugs. (Or rather, more likely, a food supplement can be better.) The supplement pill is a simple answer to complex problems. One of the biggest lures for a healing pill is slimming aids where a natural and healthy food supplement can lead to a slimmer you without the unnecessary inconvenience of actually thinking about your diet and your relationship with eating.

Pollan blames the corporate lobbies for this state of affairs. Rather than governments issuing simple health messages like 'eat less meat', the corporate lobbies have made sure this message has become 'reduce saturated-fat intake'. The meat producers are more happy with this message as they can market their meat pies with healthy messages of 'lower saturated fat'. And of course, the emphasis of nutrients rather than food now allows the vitamin pill entrepreneurs to complete the severance of health from food and sell you nutrients in little white tubs.

And so, a happy money-making informal collaboration now exists between food manufacturers and nutritional therapists that has created an artificial industry in 'health food' using the confusion of pseudoscience. This 'confusopoly' of businesses and their dietary health claims is not there to improve your health but to sell products that you would not otherwise buy. Sometimes this alliance is not so informal but carefully put together through marketing endorsements and product tie-ins. You need to buy the books of Patrick Holford, attend one of his seminars, subscribe to his newsletters and buy his specially formulated nutrient concoctions. Attempts by the government to reverse this trend, such as the 'five a day' message, are undermined by the vitamin sellers telling us that we can never get enough from mere food.

But the harm of this is not just the creation of a society confused about health and diet. We learn from the BBC today that many species of plants with potential pharmaceutical uses are endangered from over-collection and deforestation. It talks of one species,

Hoodia, which originally comes from Namibia and is attracting interest from drug firms looking into developing weight loss drugs, is on the verge of extinction.

Hoodia is a massive slimming supplement fad. Type it into google and see the adverts scream at you. What the BBC fails to really highlight is that the threat does not come from pharmaceutical companies over exploiting this resource in an attempt to find new drugs, but from your friendly, green and healthy high street health food shop. Hoodia Gordonii is a CITES protected species and yet it is on sale in shops like Holland and Barrett. I have written before about how Holland and Barrett sells shark-derived products that have no health benefits at all. The evidence base for Hoodia is equally as lean. People are buying empty promises in pill form rather than eating less.

We live in a world where truth has been inverted in the interests of corporate nutrition. The real food that we should be eating struggles to be heard over the cacophony of health claims from vested interests. We have been taught to think in terms of nutrients rather than diets and to leap on sciencey sounding easy fixes for our problems in pill form. Not only have we been divorced from the simple pleasures of eating well but our desires for faddish health fixes endangers not only ourselves and our wallets but our natural environment too.

Labels: diets, Holland and Barrett, Patrick Holford, vitamins

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Holland & Barrett: Quacks and Shark Killers

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Here's something that I feel passionate about.

Le Canard Noir is a diving duck and has just come back from a diving holiday. Most divers I meet have developed a special sense of awareness of the fragility of the underwater environment and many of my scuba friends are involved with conservation projects. We see things non-divers do not: damaged reefs, bleached reefs, discarded nets, rubbish, hooks in fish, and disturbingly, we see no sharks. In years of diving the Med, I have never seen a shark. I have seen multitudes of sharks elsewhere, but never in the Med. Shark numbers are in decline.

All my diving friends, who have encountered sharks, have similar tales about their first shark dive. They do not report feeling afraid, just awe. Regardless of prior apprehension or fear, every first time shark diver swims towards them, not away. Something strange happens. After that first sharp intake of breath, you quickly want to experience them to the full and fill yourself with this fleeting moment. They are beautiful creatures that make a diving trip in a way that no other creature does. You talk about nothing else in the bar, afterwards. In the diver magazines causes of diver deaths are often reported and I have never seen a death or injury by shark. It just does not happen. Scuba deaths are overwhelmingly caused by ignoring, or diving beyond, your training.

Conversely, millions of sharks are killed by humans every year and their long maturation and gestation periods make them particularly vulnerable to over fishing. Unlike bony fish, blue sharks vivipariously give birth to a low number of young and take a long time doing it, and demand for shark products is growing, raising serious questions about their future in the hands of the terrifying marine predator known as the human.

And so it comes as no surprise to see a letter in this month's Diver magazine about Holland and Barret selling shark cartilage food supplements. Sue Wright of Bradford wrote a letter headed "Pills make me see red" and continued,

I recently visited a Holland and Barrett and was disgusted to see shark's cartilage tablets on sale... I later emailed the company, which replied saying that it sold 'loads' of the tablet, and apologies for upsetting me. They had not just upset me, they had really angered me!

I looked online to see why anyone would buy these tablets. They seam to be aimed at three illnesses - arthritis, cancer and fibromyalgia - bit as far as I can see, it is only the maker that recommends them.

Holland and Barrett replied to Diver enquiries,

We take the threat and welfare to endangered species very seriously and would not be selling any product that contained a by-product of an endangered species of shark. ... our product ... is a by product of the blue-shark which we are assured is not an endangered species.

Shark cartilage is a hugely popular dietary supplement used by thousands of our customers. Customers say it benefits their health with ailments such as arthritis. There is also clinical evidence that backs up such claims...

Holland and Barrett will continue to sell shark cartilage due to popular demand, until such time that the species is classed as endangered.

Let's take that apart. What are Holland and Barrett really saying?

Holland and Barrett will of course support banal platitudes about green issues and saving the planet. Our actions are of course different. Someone has told us that fishing for sharks is OK, probably our suppliers.

We sell shed loads of these pills and will continue to do so while our clueless customers continue to believe the nonsense on the web about the magical properties of shark cartilage. Sharks never get cancer, don't you know? We read it on Wikipedia.

As Holland and Barret is owned by one of the largest American pharmaceutical companies, we will continue exercise our inalienable rights to make shed loads of money regardless of what you think, and to flog this stuff as long as it is legal, the customers remain gullible, and we can source the raw materials.

So, does Holland and Barrett's defence add up? Do they sell endangered species by-products? The difficulty with sharks is that so little is known about them. We just do not know enough to fully understand the impact of fishing 10-20 million blue shark individuals. The World Conservation Union, a Swiss-based conservation body, consider the blue shark to be "Near Threatened" and is on their 'red list'. So whilst, Holland and Barrett may be technically correct, what are they doing about their trade to ensure that the blue shark retains viable numbers? Uncertainty in understanding how fishing impacts this species should encourage us to be cautious for using this species for trivial uses.

And is the use of shark cartilage trivial? Do these supplements do anything? Again, as with most CAM, the stories about shark cartilage appear to be just that - stories. Sharks do get cancer. Gary K. Ostrander et al report in Cancer Research that "justifications for using shark cartilage are illogical extensions of the finding of antiangiogenic and anti-invasive substances in cartilage".
Furthermore,

The claims that sharks do not, or rarely, get cancer was originally argued by I. William Lane in a book entitled "Sharks Don’t Get Cancer" in 1992, publicized in "60 Minutes" television segments in 1993, and reargued in another book in 1996. The titles of the books do not match their texts in which the authors note that sharks actually get cancer but claim incorrectly that sharks rarely get cancer. We make three main points below: (a) sharks do get cancer; (b) the rate of shark cancer is not known from present data; and (c) even if the incidence of shark cancer were low, cancer incidence is irrelevant to the use of crude [shark] extracts for cancer treatment.

As for other claims of healing benefits from shark cartilage, it is worth noting that there are other, far cheaper and more environmentally friendly sources of cartilage that could be used. Pig's ears spring to mind. I speculate that this might be somewhat harder to market in your local high street, even if it were effective - which it isn't. Holland and Barrett fail to give references for their 'clinical evidence'. There is no good evidence - at best, just some speculative test tube experiments.

It is difficult to think of another shop on the high street where the vast majority of their products do absolutely nothing and are based on nothing but delusions. Holland and Barrett are leaches on our culture of distrust in science and medicine and prey on people who 'like to to take control of their health'. This story exposes the myths of alternative health care being green and caring, about small alternative health businesses versus 'Big Pharma', and enabling people to manage their own illnesses. Shark cartilage is sold by a billion dollar US based pharmaceutical company, NBTY (owners of Holland and Barrett and GNC), with no good evidence of effectiveness and who in doing so, threaten vulnerable species. On top of this, the Food Standards Agency have issued warnings about US imported shark cartilage pills being a source of salmonella. NBTY issued a recall on their shark products earlier in the year.

Some conservation organisations are on the case. Bite-Back, a shark and marine conservation body, have a ready made web form for you to sign and send to Holland and Barrett expressing your concern. Why not give it a go?

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More campaigns and info on sharks and overfishing here...

http://www.bite-back.com/

http://www.visiondive.com/sites/protection/english/holland_and_barrett.html

http://www.sharktrust.org/content.asp?did=28209

http://www.seashepherd.org/longline/

Labels: Holland and Barrett

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