Supplements - A Licence to Krill

A wise man once said that capitalism is a system wherein people buy things they don't need at prices they can't afford. Actually that's a lie, it wasn't a wise person at all, I just made it up. But assuming that assessment is fair, and I say it is, health product manufacturers are definitely in the upper echelon of my Capitalism Power Rankings.

This guy is currently in the lead.

What sets this industry apart from your run of the mill corporate barony is not just that it gets people to buy things they don't need, but that it convinces people to do so to treat problems they don't realise they have. They don't realise they have these problems because the problems aren't real. It's like my fundamental rule of human behaviour says: people are idiots.

How else to explain the fact that some companies make and some people actually buy chlorophyll supplements (Jayamala Gupte, "Natural Health" (April 2014) 95 Australian Journal of Pharmacy 20). Chlorophyll is the green pigment which allows plants and algae to absorb energy from sunlight in a process known as photosynthesis.

Humans, on the other hand, derive energy from consuming plants and animals. We do not absorb light, as proven by a Swiss lady who unsurprisingly died after switching to a diet of solar radiation. No amount of chlorophyll is going to help you reach your life goals, unless your goal is starvation. By the way, is it a coincidence that the supplement manufacturer and the lady that died were both Swiss(e). No, no it wasn't.

This guy needs his chlorophyll. Not you. You have a teaspoon of cement instead.

In terms of problems people don't realise they have, one of them is something called 'dry mouth syndrome,' colloquially called 'dry mouth.' Or even more commonly known as "hey my mouth is dry, or I'm thirsty, I better drink some water." To help treat this condition, the wonderful people at GlaxoSmithKline created Biotene, a "full line of products" to help treat dry mouth. For the low low price of all of your money, GSK offers a lifetime supply of treatment for a condition we all suffer from. Have you ever had a dry mouth at some time in your life, ever? Well you too need this amazing product!

There's one for every pie-hole in the family!

The Victorian Government has a fact sheet about 'dry mouth syndrome' which apparently is a real thing they call xerostomia. One of the things they recommend to manage symptoms of xerostomia is to "sip plain tap water often." Drink water if your mouth is dry? Who knew? Certainly not the scientists, marketers and other assorted geniuses at GSK who gave us 386 Biotene products. They're hoping that you didn't know about the tap water solution either.

DRINK UP

It's this kind of hokum which accounts for the absurdity of things like krill oil being marketed as a remedy for all kinds of problems, from high blood pressure to the pain I feel from my brain being too large. At least that's what the emails in my Spam tray tell me. Now, humans have being using fish oils for millennia as constitutional aids (as well as mammal oils - Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about the benefits of dolphin liver oil for skin conditions).

Roman Medicine: Best Medicine

In the case of krill though, it was originally taken up by the Soviets in the late 1970s as food, because nothing encourages fine dining like a closed, centrally planned economy managed by the same permafrost-dwellers that gave the world such delicacies as borscht!

Russian for "Om nom nom!"

The global krill catch plummeted after the Soviet Union dissolved, but has steadily increased again as the supplements industry discovered that Westerners would shell out cash for the oil of a tiny organism nobody had really heard of.

Historical krill catches. Yes, these are actual useful statistics from an official UN-type source.

Never mind that the health benefits of both fish and krill oils may be illusory (Peter Carroll, "Fish and krill oil supplements" (2013) 94 Australian Journal of Pharmacy 70), or that we humans have no business eating penguin food - just tell people that this thing they've never heard of is good for them and they'll lap it up. Kind of like kale really. And if krill is good enough for us, krill food should be good enough for us as well. That's why my hot tip for the next big "superfood" craze after kale is none other than: plankton.

That plankton's some good eating.

The impression you may have formed so far is that this is a benign arm of our immensely varied capitalist economy. After all, if someone wants to spend a very small amount of their disposable income on chlorophyll, plankton or any other product which produces no tangible benefit like detox diet kits which don't work and ignore the pre-installed detoxifier you're born with called your liver, well what's the harm?

ULTIMATE DETOX KIT

Sadly though, it is my duty to speak up on behalf of all parents everywhere and tell the world that significant harm is being caused by, you guessed it, baby formula. Or more accurately these days, follow-on (toddler) formula.

Speaking on behalf of others? Nick mansplains it all!

Consider the themes used to market formula. Commonly it is promised that with the formula's mix of nutrients, meganutrients, probiotics, macrobiotics, prebiotics, antibiotics, narcotics and voodoo, your child will get the best start to life, and your child needs this because that's what your child deserves.

Let me take the time to note that formula itself is a great invention which is eminently useful in a variety of situations. I make no comment or judgment on its efficacy vis-a-vis breastfeeding, all that's important is that babies are healthy and fed, how you get there isn't important. Hooray for babies!

Hooray!

Similarly, there are some supplements which are proven to have beneficial effects for infant health. For example, Bower et al recommend the promotion of folate supplements periconceptionally after it was demonstrated that sufficient levels materially reduce the prevalence of neural tube birth defects ("Folate promotion and neural tube defects" (2004) 28(5) Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 458).

I don't understand that last paragraph either.

Nonetheless, the marketing and sale of infant formula - that is, for newborns - encompassed a range of problems. Quite apart from health problems which may or may not arise from the use of or reliance on formula, Justice Michael Kirby in 1983 observed that formula was comparatively expensive as opposed to other forms of nutrition, and that in the developing world in particular families were buying formula they could barely afford (Michael Kirby, "The Role of Law Reform in Bioethics" (1983) 6 UNSW Law Journal 67). The observed reasons for formula use in these circumstances included a belief in the scientific claims of the manufacturers and a desire to do what was best for the child. That was 35 years ago. What has changed?

Well 34 years ago, and apropos some of the problems observed by Justice Kirby, the World Health Organisation formulated the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. Under this Code, mothers are not to be given free samples of formula (as occurred previously) and most notably, product promotion and advertising for infant formula was banned. Australia has implemented the Code on a voluntary basis although it has not been enacted into law.

Because the Code only applies to "infant" formula, the manufacturers of Karicare (Nutricia), S26 (Pfizer) and NAN (Nestlé) are perfectly free to flood the next best market and sell their voodoobiotics to toddlers and their overanxious parents like a bunch of sharks if the sharks were Jordan Belfort. I guess that analogy works better with wolves instead of sharks but hey, screw you.

Keep him away from the little ones.

In fact I'd wager that these toddler ad campaigns are more effective than even infant formula campaigns, because instead of having sluggish, colicky or crying newborns, now the marketers just have to overstimulate some happy toddlers with red cordial and let the cameras roll.

She doesn't even know what a prebiotic is. Come to think of it, I don't know what a prebiotic is.

Add some sophistry about how your toddler is going to have scurvy, rickets and lupus if they don't drink the Karicare-Aid and hey presto, now you've started a year-long argument on the Mama Mia forums about which formula is best for Jayden, Skyler and little Kyly.

The manufacturers are trading on bullshit to scare parents, because what parent doesn't want to do what's best for their kids? The irony is that toddlers are so much less likely to need supplements as they start eating real food. Nestlé and Pfizer put so much energy into pushing their products which the toddlers don't need, and it works because of parental guilt.

If this toddler could talk it would say ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!

The claims made by manufacturers rely on a tradition of data manipulation by corporate processes (Boehne and Egilman, "Over A Barrel: Corporate Corruption of Science and Its Effects on Workers and the Environment" (2005) 11(4) Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 331). While scientific output may be influenced to manage standards and shape regulation, the overarching goal is to maximise the capitalist's profit.

On another level, capitalists hawking ineffective products turn to celebrities, aspiration and charismatic toddlers where the effectiveness of their products is unproven (Peter Waterman, "Balancing the dream-weaving with evidence" (July 2013) Australian Pharmacist 30).

Pliny's dolphin oil remedy is an example of the ancientness of human faith in untested complementary medicine. Yet I remain convinced that an old-school approach will be the best one for treating the scourge that is the snake oil industry. If your doctor hasn't identified a proper reason for you to hit the chlorophyll, give it up. And if your doctor has too many pens with the names of drugs on them, well...

Don't worry too much about what your toddler drinks. The children of Genghis Khan had no need for Aptamil. They forged an empire while drinking the blood of their enemies.