The FDA has announced a ban on Ephedra, a herb that has been used in different remedies for millennia and that more recently has been sold as an energy booster and slimming aid.
While it is quite correct that a dangerous product should be banned if the risk posed by it is - let's use the FDA's own term - "unreasonably high", I am afraid that the evaluation of the deaths may be fatally flawed. In fact, many of the deaths may be due less to ephedra ingestion than to an overuse of 'sugar free' soft drinks, including popular sports drinks, containing ASPARTAME. The artificial sweetener has been implicated in a series of deaths and has more recently been said to be the cause of cardiac arrests, much the same as the ephedra herb.
Aspartame was approved by the FDA over the express opinion of its own expert panel, in a perfect exercise of the "revolving door" game between the FDA and big industry, in this case G. D. Searle corporation, under its then CEO Donald Rumsfeld, who brought political clout to bear where scientific information could not do the trick.
Unfortunately, even today no one at the FDA seems to be allowed to look at a possible causation of death by Aspartame, or look at the figures of Aspartame disease, although there are certainly enough indications to warrant immediate attention. But no, we can relax, the culprit has been identified and we can go on drinking Coke or Pepsy light or Gatorade, aspartame included. And what's one less herb - aren't there several thousand of them?
Coming back to Ephedra, it appears that the FDA considers it dangerous if sold as a dietary supplement, but is quite prepared to leave numerous cough medicines on the market, which contain comparable amounts of the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine. See what Rob McCaleb, a natural product consultant with the international law firm of Greenberg Traurig LLP and founder and president of the Herb Research Foundation says in a recent article.
