Supplementation Safety Supplementation Safety Occupying a middle ground between food and medicine, supplements have been eagerly adopted by millions of Americans for a host of reasons. Mounting evidence suggests that benefits far outweigh negatives in the area of dietary supplementation. Yet, the media, medical organizations, public interest groups and others regularly raise safety concerns relating to dietary supplements. One does not think of peanut butter as a killer, yet allergic reactions to peanuts, which can cause severe respiratory problems and even death, are fairly common.
Milk is a staple of the American diet.
Yet undiagnosed lactose intolerance is another common cause of illness. Unsupervised children are regularly poisoned by Tylenol and aspirin despite the best efforts of manufacturers to limit children's access to such common drugs. In April of 1998, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs killed over 106,000 hospital patients in the preceding year due to toxic reactions. The fall 1998 edition of Natural Health reports that adverse events from prescribed drugs sent over 1 million people to the hospital in the previous year. To suggest that advanced medical care and hospital facilities that save millions of lives be called into question on the basis of limited mortality statistics flies in the face of logic.