Dietary supplements marketed to provide male sexual enhancement contain undeclared erectile dysfunction drugs putting users at risk, the Food and Drug Administration says.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The agency advised consumers to stay away from Shangai Chaojimengnan supplements sold under the names Super Shangai, Strong Testis, Shangai Ultra, Shangai Ultra X, Lady Shangai and Shangai Regular. The Chinese-made supplements are packaged and distributed by Shangai Distributor Inc. of Puerto Rico. Product testing indicates that some of these so-called supplements contain Viagra's active ingredient, sildenafil, or a compound with a chemical structure that mimics sildenafil. These chemicals could interact with nitrates in drugs taken for disorders commonly associated with erectile dysfunction, including diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease. The result could dangerously lower a user's blood pressure, according to the FDA.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The agency also warned that the safety and purity of these illegal ingredients is unknown. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,319172,00.html
What part of this makes it any more or less of a health risk than regular viagara? Or even the nitric oxide supplements taken daily as a supplement by body builders?
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Simple. The fact that regular Viagra lists it's ingredients and comes with a warning about the conditions the FDA listed. But this stuff comes with neither - leaving the consumer with a false sense of safety.
Well, actually it does. It says the drugs are "undeclared" which means the ingredients aren't listed. And drugs that aren't listed wouldn't come with warnings. The makers tried to skip around regulations by selling them as "dietary supplements" since they require neither a list of ingredients or any warnings/cautions.
People are skeptical of the FDA and it's hard to blame them. Ideally, something like the FDA is probably a good idea, but as inevitably happens when the government tries to assume a paternalistic role over society, it just doesn't do a very geat job of it. People need more freedom to perform the cost-benefit analysis that underlies risk management because the costs and benefits of taking any given risk are not the same for everyone. The fundamental premise of government is "One Size Fits All" and that is patently false in all but a few cases. For some men, erectile dysfunction is so great an issue of quality of life, that they're willing to take the risk of the aggregate effects of these ingredients. They'd rather die than never have another erection, so to merely take a statistical chance of dying in order to have more and larger erections is an individual choice. The arbitrary division of ingestibles into "medications" and "food supplements," with two different sets of rules, reduces the amount of information they have in order to make that an informed choice.