Urban Health Fair Pt.1

Last weekend, my friend Michael (who is the president of the St. Louis Skeptical Society) and I went with Michael’s son to the Urban Health Fair in St. Louis.

The Urban Health Fair was billed as having “educational opportunities with a full day of entertainment and fun activities for all ages”. It was essentially an alternative medicine health fair, featuring booths with vendors across disciplines, including chiropractic, acupuncture, Tai Chi, Massage therapy and spas, vitamin supplements, aromatherapy, yoga, the St. Louis school of metaphysics, a “green” cleaning company, Indigo massage, personal training, a bicycle company, and a holistic pet food store.

The fair took place along a closed-off block in the middle of historic St. Louis, adjacent to a park. The event featured live music, which was on a stage far enough away from the fair to be heard easily but not so close that it was louse enough to disrupt conversation. It was also a dog friendly event, so I brought my dog.

Surprisingly, there were not a whole lot of people million about between booths – much less than I expected. The largest concentration of customers was a gaggle of women surrounding a booth selling fair trade handmade purses and bags. It seemed as though there were not many more customers than people doing vending and organization.

The first booth I visited was an urban pet supply store which offered grooming as well as pet foods – the type of store that prides itself in stocking high-end dog foods, including boutique kibble, handmade human-grade dog treats, raw food diet supplies and supplements. Over at the booth, everyone fawned over my dog (who is a massive golden retriever) and a vendor asked me what kind of food I fed him. My guess is that dogs have been domesticated next to humans for thousands of years, fed on diets mainly consisting of table scraps. As such, I feed him table scraps and guy him a different kind of dog food every time a bag runs out. I avoid the cheapest stuff though. The vendor gave me a bag positively filled with samples of various dog foods – probably nearly a week’s worth of food – and then asked me about his health and joints.

I knew where this was going. Glucosamine and condroitin anyone? My dog has had surgery on both of his knees – he tore the cruxiate ligaments in both and had to have metal plates put in both of his tibias. I’ve actually spent five thousand dollars on the bastard’s knees, and he can’t even get a job to pay me back. After telling this to the vendor, he told me that I should supplement my dog with glucosamine and condroitin to prevent osteoarthritis as well as give him fish oil – the latter because it contained antioxidents and the former for his joints.

First, these supplements – like all other “dietary supplements” for dogs or otherwise, have an incredibly low bar of standardization to follow – nothing even close to the content standardization, safety and efficacy testing that must be done in order to have an FDA approved drug. Natural products vary greatly in the amount of active ingredient they contain for a few reasons – the production and manufacturing process, for one. Because there is really no standardization process, the amount of active ingredient in herbal supplements can vary from bottle to bottle [1]. By, this, I do not mean that different manufacturers have different mg content stated on the bottle – I mean that the actual content of active ingredient differs from what is stated on the bottle. In the study I referenced, it varied from 59-138%.

There don’t seem to be any side-effects of using glucosamine supplements aside from spending too much money or the more general instances of toxicity [2] in unregulated herbal supplements due to impurities. Herbal preparations have been known to be imbued with a plethora of unexpected ingredients not listed on the bottles, such as belladonna, salmonella, pesticides, lead, arsenic, anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids [3]. Again, these are largely due to the fact that herbal supplements are an unstandardized, untested industry. Perhaps these costs and risks would be worth it if glucosamine supplements had a beneficial effect on joints (or any other body system, for that matter).

Glucosamine and controitin are both found in joints, and it is one of the things that get worn down when animals with joints made of bone get osteoarthritis. But thinking that eating these two substances or swallowing them in pill form will somehow cause their wear to be reduced in osteoarthritis makes about as much sense as thinking that swallowing semen will increase your sperm count or eating liver will cause your liver to make new liver cells. There is no evidence that glucosamine/condroitin are delivered to the joints from your digestive system. There is no evidence that these substances work any better than a placebo at reducing arthritis [4].

What about this fish oil thing? I don’t really have a problem with supplementing with Omega-3 fatty acids, but el-cheapo-cod liver oil works just as well as expensive drops or pills. My dog doesn’t need pills! He’ll eat anything.

Stay tuned – tomorrow I’ll let you in on a little secret – apparently Michael and I have a son, and it’s “very clear” that he is an indigo child!

1. Russel AS, Aghazadeh-Habashi A, Jamali F. Active ingredient consistency of commercially available glucosamine sulfate products. Journal of Rhumatology 2009;36:2407-2409
2. De Smet PAGM. Herbal Remedies. New England Journal of Medicine 2002;347:2046-2056
3. De Smet PAGM, Keller K, Hänsel R, Chandler RF, eds. Adverse effects of herbal drugs. Vol. 1. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 1992:1-72
4. Clegg DO, Reda DJ, Harris CL, Klein MA, O’Dell JR, Hooper MM, Bradley JD, Bingham CO 3rd, Weisman MH, Jackson CG, Lane NE, Cush JJ, Moreland LW, Schumacher HR Jr, Oddis CV, Wolfe F, Molitor JA, Yocum DE, Schnitzer TJ, Furst DE, Sawitzke AD, Shi H, Brandt KD, Moskowitz RW, Williams HJ. Glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate, and the two in combination for painful knee osteoarthritis. New England Journal of Medicine 2006;354:795-808