Magic Little Pills

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dream – "Magic Little Pills" (Feb 26, 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this lively return of "The Dream," host Jane Marie—joined by co-host Dan Gallucci and guest science journalist Katherine Price—dives into the mystical, murky, and increasingly unregulated world of vitamin and supplement culture in America. Using her own quest for wellness as a springboard, Jane investigates the billion-dollar industry that promises health and longevity (often with little evidence), exploring how history, science, marketing, and weak regulation have made the modern supplement aisle both alluring and alarming. The episode combines skepticism, humor, and plenty of personal anecdotes to unpack both the promise and peril of "magic little pills."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jane’s Personal Wellness Anxiety and the Allure of Supplements

• Timestamps: 01:03–03:13
• Jane opens with her increasing anxiety around wellness culture—wondering if she needs to overhaul her life, toss out fast food and cleaning products, or even turn to televised “accountability coaches”.
• A humorous account of a wellness-induced nightmare highlights the confusion and pressure many feel to “get healthy.”

"It's really caused my anxiety to spike. My days are filled with creepy thoughts about what my insides look like, where cancer is growing or might grow later...what if the stress from never chilling out is killing me?" —Jane Marie (01:18)

2. Encounter with Moon Juice and the ‘Dust’ Craze

• Timestamps: 04:08–08:48
• After failing to contact celebrity coaches, Jane investigates Moon Juice, a trendy LA-based supplement brand with products like “Brain Dust” and “Sex Dust.”
• She describes the ambiguous, expensive, and often directionless nature of these products, which contain exotic-sounding ingredients (pulverized mushrooms, pearl powder, ashwagandha, etc.).

"No offense, Amanda [Chantal Bacon], but after everything I've read about you, I don't really feel like sitting down and talking would be very productive—or very nice." —Jane Marie (04:46)

• The lack of clear directions and ingredient transparency leaves Jane frustrated and skeptical.

3. Supplement Skepticism—Why Do We Believe?

• Timestamps: 08:48–11:11
• Dan confides throwing out bags of powders and supplements after talking to Katherine Price, illustrating that even informed adults are drawn in by marketing and pseudo-science.

"That's the thing that's so funny. That is the most grandiose Claim of anything I've ever taken before. And yet I just was like, great, let's do it. Not even an ounce of skepticism..." —Dan Gallucci (10:34)

4. What Even Is a Vitamin? (A Science Primer)

• Timestamps: 11:11–12:53
• Katherine Price provides a clear definition: there are 13 known human vitamins, needed in tiny amounts to prevent deficiency diseases—most can’t be made by our bodies alone.
• The history: term 'vitamin' coined by Casimir Funk in 1911, leading to public fascination and sometimes panic about these “invisible substances” in food.

5. Deficiency Diseases: Why Supplements Seem Compelling

• Timestamps: 16:44–21:43
• Fascinating stories about scurvy (Vitamin C) and beriberi (Vitamin B1)—diseases that devastated populations before vitamins were discovered—highlight why the public so eagerly embraced vitamin pills.
• The industrial revolution and processing trends inadvertently destroyed these essential nutrients, paving the way for synthetic vitamin fortification.

6. The Birth of the Dietary Supplement Industry

• Timestamps: 21:43–27:47
• Once vitamins could be isolated and synthesized (1930s–WWII), advertising and government interventions (fortifying foods) exploded in tandem.
• Katherine recounts visiting the US Army’s Natick center, where military rations are engineered to just meet nutritional needs—without the super-dosing seen in the civilian market.

“The military...have to have foods that last a really long time. So they’re completely dependent on putting synthetic vitamins into the foods...” —Katherine Price (26:30)

7. From Fortification to Hype: The Linus Pauling Effect

• Timestamps: 27:47–29:34
• Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate, popularized the idea that mega-doses of vitamin C could cure colds and cancer (it can’t), beginning the parade of celebrity-driven supplement fads and pseudoscientific claims.

“If you’re taking a sugar pill and you believe that it’s going to prevent colds, it may actually prevent colds because the placebo effect is extremely strong.” —Katherine Price (28:57)

8. Vitamins vs. Supplements: Definitions and Confusion

• Timestamps: 29:34–31:21
• Katherine explains that while all vitamins as pills are dietary supplements, not all dietary supplements are vitamins. Most products in the “vitamin aisle” include herbs, “sexual enhancement,” bodybuilding aids, and more—often lumped together by marketing rather than science.

9. The Problem With (Lack of) Regulation

• Timestamps: 31:21–36:17
• The 1976 Proxmire Amendment prevents the FDA from regulating supplement contents—companies can sell pills at almost any dosage and call virtually anything a “vitamin.”
• Jane highlights troubling inconsistencies in multivitamin products (e.g., some women’s gummies contain no iron, despite anemia risks).

“The FDA truly tried...The supplement industry saw it as an opportunity to say that the government was taking away your basic rights. So they threw a bunch of money at lobbyists and basically cut the FDA off at the knees.” —Jane Marie (33:01)

• In 1994, further deregulation (DSHEA) ensures that most products on the market are barely controlled—leaving consumers at risk, unable to even know what’s in “proprietary blends.”

“Proprietary blend is basically code for secret...Best case scenario is that [a supplement] does not do anything to your body, but if it is giving you acne, it is doing something to your hormones.” —Katherine Price (37:01)

10. Final Reflections

• Consumers are left to navigate the "wellness" marketplace alone, caught between genuine nutritional needs, clever marketing, incomplete information, and toothless regulation.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Amanda runs a company called Moon Juice...they have products called Dusts, Brain Dust and Sex Dust and Beauty dust that contain things like pulverized dehydrated mushrooms ... and pearl, like actual pearl.” —Jane Marie (04:46)
• “Severe physical symptoms was the definition of overdosing.” —Jane Marie (06:14)
• “Would you buy something called food accessory factor fortified nut milks?” —Jane Marie (12:53)
• “It is a category that goes way, way, way beyond just vitamins or their counterpart minerals.” —Katherine Price (29:53)
• “This right here is what should freak you out the most. If you’re wondering who’s minding the store, the FDA truly tried...” —Jane Marie (33:01)
• “So the Proxmire Amendment blocked the FDA’s ability to create a system where there would be consistency.” —Katherine Price (34:51)
• "Best case scenario is that Natural Curves does not do anything to your body, but if it is giving you acne, it is doing something to your hormones." —Katherine Price (37:01)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 01:03 – Jane's wellness anxiety and self-reflection
• 04:46 – Enter Moon Juice: the LA supplement scene
• 09:00 – Dan ditches his supplements after talking with Katherine
• 11:19 – What is a vitamin? (Science primer)
• 17:57 – Deficiency diseases, from scurvy to beriberi
• 26:30 – Military nutrition: how vitamins get added to rations
• 28:22 – Linus Pauling and the cultural rise of vitamin C
• 29:53 – Vitamins vs. dietary supplements: definitions and confusions
• 33:01 – Proxmire Amendment: why the FDA can't regulate your supplements

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Tone & Style

• The tone is conversational, witty, and a bit irreverent—cutting through hype with skepticism while poking fun at both wellness fads and regulatory failures.
• The discussion combines personal stories, historic vignettes, and sharp critique of industry and government, maintaining the show's signature blend of snark and substance.

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For New Listeners

If you’ve ever wondered who actually benefits from the American supplement craze—and whether your expensive “dusts” and gummies do anything at all—this episode provides a colorful and critical look behind the curtain, arming you with history, humor, and healthy skepticism for your next trip down the vitamin aisle.

Transcript

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[Jane Marie]

I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream. All of this talk of wellness, of being healthy and having a positive mindset and all that, from the very beginning of intently thinking about it, because of this podcast, it's really caused my anxiety to spike. My days are filled with creepy thoughts about what my insides look like, where cancer is growing or might grow later, how clogged my arteries probably are, and what my liver thinks of everything. It's not just days. The anxiety is creeping into nighttime too. It's, let's see, 11:04 at night. I woke up out of my sleep tonight with the idea that I should try to do wellness. I had a nightmare that the speaker system at the drive through at Arby's stopped working. Sorry. And that I. I was the one at the speaker when I was trying to make my order and I couldn't. And then a line of like 30 cars lined up behind me and they were all honking at me, but no one could hear me on the other side of the speaker. I was hungry in the middle of the night. I think it's kind of one of those dreams where you have to pee and you really do have to pee. At any rate, for this podcast, perhaps I could get healthy. I don't know how. That's not true. I'm unhealthy, not a complete ding dong. What I mean is that I don't know how to actually implement wellness in my life in a way that's authentic. Like, my first concern was that I'd have to stop eating fast food, obviously. And then I'd have to throw out everything in my house. Every cleaning product and toiletry and all my makeup. Maybe the crystals Dan has given me are all wrong or in the wrong places. Or what if the stress from never chilling out is killing me? What if I'm living in the wrong place, in the wrong body, with all the wrong stuff entirely? At first, I considered hiring someone to help me figure out where to start.

[Dan Gallucci]

And.

[Jane Marie]

And the person who came to mind was Teddi Mellencamp of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and her father's fame. Once I started holding myself accountable, I just said, I'm gonna open my own Instagram account. I'm gonna name it something, and I'm gonna post my workouts every single day. And I just said, hi, I'm Teddy Mellencamp Arrave. Follow me. If you're lost in your journey and you're trying to figure out what to do, let's see what happens. According to the TV show, she's an accountability coach, which. Which I imagined meant that I could hire her to call me every single day and remind me to eat well and work out and keep a gratitude journal or something. But she wasn't available because it turns out you can't just call people you see on TV and ask them to fix your life. And then I recalled a very buzzy wellness guru here in la, a woman named Amanda Chantal Bacon. Here's a video of Amanda from the New York Times.

[Sleep Number Customer]

I grabbed us a selection of really potent foods that I put into my D. Almost every day, we're going for something that's going to be energizing and also good for the brain. So we're sort of winging it here. That's what's happening. And we are going to start with a base, a raw sprouted stone ground nut butter. The next one that we're going to go for are tocotrienols. And then we are going to be adding this protein blend. The amino acid profile is very, very, very similar, almost exact to human breast milk. Does a body good. Next trick.

[Jane Marie]

No offense, Amanda, but after everything I've read about you, I don't really feel like sitting down and talking would be very productive or very nice of me. But to be fair, I reached out anyway and got no response from your press office or the request that I submitted through your website. So I'm just going to talk about you. Amanda runs a company called Moon Juice. They make supplements and things that seem kind of like foods, and they have A couple cafes here in la, but if you're not in la, you can get their stuff at Sephora. Seriously, they have products called Dusts, Brain Dust and Sex Dust and Beauty dust that contain things like pulverized dehydrated mushrooms of different sorts and root extracts and berry powders and pearl, like actual pearl.

[Sleep Number Customer]

I use Pearl almost every day. This pearl powder is literally pearl. And the other thing that's nice is you can actually put this on your face at night. Ashwagandha. I try to get a little bit of ashwagandha in every day as well.

[Jane Marie]

And our last guy here, Amanda's been written about by Elle magazine and New York magazine and Bon appetit and everybody. And somehow, even though I love keeping up with the gossip about her, I've managed to avoid going into her cafe, which is literally down the street from my house. It's so close I could walk there. But this is la. I had never noticed this place before, but it's right by Dan's house too. It's like the middle spot between my house and Dan's house. Maybe this will be our new hangout in the store. I talked to the saleswoman and she was very woo woo and told me how some powder could fix my pancreas. But I didn't bring up my pancreas. She brought up my pancreas. She recommended a combo of protein powder and a thing called tocos, which is a product name of a thing called tocotrienols, which is, it turns out, just rice bran, but a very expensive version of rice bran. Just left Moon Juice. And I want to try to remember the sales pitch before I get home and forget it. Okay. The vanilla mushroom app to. Oh, adaptogenic protein that I got is protein. I don't know. She said something about Ashwagandha, Reishi, cordyceps, something about antioxidants. And this will help me help my muscles feel better or my body feel better in some way. No, wait, that was the other one. I don't know. And then I chose the Beauty dust and the power dust. I ended up buying four jars of powders and it was just over $200, which made me think that maybe you only put a tiny sprinkle on or in some something or whatever you do with it. So I asked the sales lady and she said I could mix it in whatever I want. Water, tea, nut milks, or sprinkle them on any of my food, or I could just eat it by the spoonful. Which reminded me of my favorite interview with the owner of Moon Juice. It was in the New York Times Sunday magazine. A few years ago. The reporter Molly Young asked Amanda, is it possible to overdose on dust? And Amanda said, no, you're good. You're safe. I mean, is it possible to overdose? You'd probably have severe physical symptoms first. And here I was thinking that severe physical symptoms was the definition of overdosing. But seriously, there are no directions on the bottles, no information about how many grams or milligrams of what I'm getting per whatever serving I choose or how often I'm supposed to mix it, and not nothing. Might as well be blank. I thought I'd be able to ask Dan since he takes all kinds of weird powders and stuff, but it was only after I spent all this money that he informed me he's recently thrown everything out of his cupboards because of this woman.

[Katherine Price]

I'm Katherine Price. I'm a science journalist and the author of Vitamania How Vitamins Revolutionize the Way We Think About Food.

[Jane Marie]

Hi.

[Dan Gallucci]

Hi. Yeah, so what you were saying was, right after I spoke with Catherine, I ended up throwing away a lot of crazy stuff from my pantry.

[Jane Marie]

Forgive me for not knowing the answer to this already. What vitamins were you taking? I know that you had green powder stuff that you would put in one of those hydro flasks or whatever, like

[Dan Gallucci]

an insulated water bottle and shake it up with juice.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah, yeah. What was that?

[Dan Gallucci]

That's moringa powder.

[Jane Marie]

Okay.

[Dan Gallucci]

What is that? Well, I was taking it because one of the things that it's supposed to be able to help with is poor circulation.

[Jane Marie]

Wait, what made you decide that?

[Dan Gallucci]

I don't know. It's basic ignorance.

[Jane Marie]

I know there was other stuff lying around the house, but I don't really know.

[Dan Gallucci]

So I had two bottles that looked like kind of like the giant Dr. Bronner's. One was like a morning multi, and one was a nighttime multi or multi. And then I would take more vitamins. I had these sprays for vitamins E and D. They were just vitamin E

[Jane Marie]

and D. Anything else?

[Dan Gallucci]

I mean, I think that was it.

[Jane Marie]

No, there was that other one, actually. Now the other one. The NAD plus stuff.

[Dan Gallucci]

Oh, sure.

[Jane Marie]

That one I believe in, and I don't know why.

[Dan Gallucci]

Me, too. And I don't know why that's supposed

[Jane Marie]

to, like, extend your cellular health or something. Is that a thing?

[Dan Gallucci]

It sure is. It's literally the one that tells you you'll live longer and look younger.

[Katherine Price]

Yeah.

[Dan Gallucci]

So that's the thing that's so funny. That is the most grandiose Claim of anything I've ever taken before. And yet I just was like, great, let's do it. Not even an ounce of skepticism, all of that stuff.

[Jane Marie]

And then you talk to Katherine.

[Dan Gallucci]

Yeah. And she explained to me a lot about what it was I was putting into my body or really what I didn't know about what I was putting into my body. Yeah, yeah. And that was how I ended up throwing a bunch of stuff away.

[Jane Marie]

The first thing you guys talked about was, like, real basic.

[Dan Gallucci]

Yeah. I mean, I really just wanted to find out what a vitamin actually was.

[Katherine Price]

I would say a couple things. The easiest definition would be that there are 13 chemicals known as vitamins. And. And they're substances that we need in very, very small amounts, without which we would develop a particular deficiency disease. And in most, but not all cases, we can't make them ourselves.

[Jane Marie]

The 13 vitamins that Katherine is referring to are vitamins A, C, D, E, and K, and eight different B vitamins. These 13 micronutrients, our bodies need them, but we weren't born being able to produce them on our own. With one exception, we. Vitamin D, which we can produce, but not without the help of sunshine. In the olden days, we had to get all of them from our food.

[Dan Gallucci]

And then when were vitamins discovered?

[Katherine Price]

So the heyday of it, I would say, is the late 1800s and early 1900s. The word vitamin itself was coined in 1911 by a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk. And at that point, no vitamins actually had been isolated. So they were suspected, but they weren't actually isolated from foods. And a lot of his contemporaries really didn't like the term. In fact, he had trouble getting it published. It was only published in 1912, in part because they were arguing for their own terms for these substances, which included ideas like food hormones and food accessory factors. If you think about it, I find it difficult to believe that if they had been called food accessory factors, that we would end up with a giant dietary supplement industry because food accessory factor. Not that great of a word. Vitamin. Really great words. Yeah, exactly.

[Jane Marie]

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[Jane Marie]

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[Katherine Price]

The process of discovering vitamins was very long. Because if you think about it, discovering a vitamin isn't like someone gives you a treasure map and you go dig somewhere in the forest, and it's like, X marks the vitamin C. And then you're like, oh, I found it. You know, I'm moving on. It actually took a really long time for people to recognize deficiency diseases, like what they were that it was a deficiency, and then to identify what sorts of food seemed to prevent that disease. The whole idea of the lack of something causing a disease was very difficult. One interesting conflating factor that one might argue delayed the discovery of vitamins was that in the 1870s, that was when people discovered that germs first of all existed and that little bacteria were behind many of the world's most destructive diseases. And so that was incredibly exciting to realize, like, cholera had a bacteria behind it, and if you could figure out where the bacteria was, you could work on preventing and curing cholera. But once you have that mindset, it makes it more difficult to recognize diseases where the cause is an absence of something.

[Dan Gallucci]

So there's actually a bunch of different deficiency diseases. And one I'm sure that people have heard of is the old sailor's disease, scurvy.

[Jane Marie]

What is scurvy?

[Dan Gallucci]

Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, and it does terrible things to you.

[Jane Marie]

I know it from Grapes of Wrath, I think, because they finally. Is that the one where they finally get to the. Like the orange groves in California, and they're like grabbing oranges that have fallen off of trees to combat their scurvy?

[Dan Gallucci]

I haven't read that in a long time, but that sounds right.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Dan Gallucci]

One of the main ways you could get scurvies is you go on a boat, and now instead of traveling short distances, the boats are bigger. This is kind of, you know, as boats got bigger and could travel long distances, then you have to figure out what kind of food are you going to take.

[Jane Marie]

There's not really fresh produce on the open seas.

[Dan Gallucci]

No, there isn't. And so what they ended up eating a lot of were biscuits or fish. And neither of those are high in vitamin C. And scurvy is a really terrible disease. You end up with open sores all over your body and in your mouth. Your gums end up turning a kind of gummy blackish color and texture. Your teeth can fall out and. Yeah, it's just pretty brutal.

[Jane Marie]

What other kinds of deficiency diseases?

[Dan Gallucci]

Well, one that is still kicking around a lot is night blindness, and that's caused by a lack of vitamin A.

[Jane Marie]

So you got scurvy, you got night blindness. What else is there?

[Dan Gallucci]

Beriberi.

[Jane Marie]

What's that one?

[Dan Gallucci]

So beriberi is caused by a lack of thiamine or vitamin B1, and it attacks your cardio and respiratory systems.

[Jane Marie]

So all of these sorts of diseases have been around since the beginning of time. If people don't have access to, like, the right kind of food.

[Dan Gallucci]

Right.

[Jane Marie]

But it wasn't until like 100 years ago then that they figured out the cause of any of this stuff.

[Dan Gallucci]

Yeah, it took a really long time, but then it progressed very rapidly. One of the reasons why it took such a long time is because of what Catherine was talking about. With germs and bacteria being discovered around the same time as vitamins, you had these kind of competing scientific discoveries.

[Katherine Price]

An example of how that played out with beriberi. That became a problem with a technological advancement, which was men's ability to make white rice as opposed to brown rice, which still has the husk on it. And when you take the husk off, you lose the thiamine, and you end up with beriberi as a result. So even when people had figured out that there was some connection between the types of rice that people were being fed and beriberi, there was a long period of time where people were insistent that there must be a bacteria present in one form of the rice that was causing the beriberi, that it wasn't the absence of this invisible substance. So when you think about it that way, you realize that's really hard to figure out, that there's an invisible substance that you can't measure and you can't see and you can't taste, and that's what must be behind this.

[Jane Marie]

At the same time, on top of everyone still being bananas about germs, the industrial revolution had just happened and foods were suddenly being mass produced. And processed foods are delicate. Heating and cooling and preserving them often destroys a lot of the really important stuff, like vitamins. So now you've got vitamins isolated and you can fortify foods with them. You know, put the stuff back in that you just took out. And people were nuts about this discovery, too. In fact, a few of the most prominent scientists working on vitamin discovery were also writing about it in magazines that you could get at the grocery store checkout like good housekeeping and McCall's. And it kind of freaked the public out, this idea that there's an invisible substance that's maybe in your food or maybe not. Who knows? How would you know? If it's not there, you could die. So there was a bit of a panic.

[Katherine Price]

And you can see that directly carrying through to today where we take all of these supplements, not just vitamins, but dietary supplements, out of hope that they're going to help us live long, healthy lives and fear that if we don't take them, something horrible is going to happen to us. You couldn't take a vitamin until scientists have figured out how to isolate it and synthesize it to actually be able to make it so that you can do things like add it back to foods or create a dietary supplement product with it. The real ability to take vitamins as pills really starts in like early 30s, late 20s, like when the first vitamins are actually isolated and processes are developed to synthesize them, and then that really does start to take off. So that by World War II, you've got synthetic vitamins being a real source of concern, and some companies providing vitamin packs for their workers. A whole three day conference for national defense focusing on vitamins in particular, with a concern that American soldiers were going to lose the war because they would not be adequately nourished when it came to vitamins.

[Jane Marie]

Here's an ad that Westinghouse, the kitchen appliance manufacturer, put out about what they called vitamized foods.

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[Katherine Price]

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[Matt from P1]

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[Jane Marie]

Thankfully, nowadays, at least, American companies can't require their employees to take a certain vitamin every morning. So Katherine figured if you want to find a testing ground for the nexus between productivity and nutrition, go to the place where people don't get to choose. That's how she ended up in Natick, Massachusetts, home of the United States Army Soldiers Systems Center.

[Katherine Price]

Yeah, I went to Natick, which is where they work on, as one person put it to me, everything that doesn't shoot out of a gun. So it's like everything from MREs, the meals ready to Eat, to flame resistant fabrics. It's a very interesting place to visit. So the military is in this interesting position where they have to meet the nutritional needs of the armed forces, but they also have to have foods that last a really long time. So they're completely dependent on putting synthetic vitamins into the foods that they're creating for the members to eat. One thing I found really interesting when I was asking the people at Natick about how they decided the levels of vitamins to put into the foods that they give to the war fighters is that you'd think the military would know better than most organizations whether or not there's a benefit to adding vitamins beyond the basic levels. So in other words, is it really going to be beneficial to put a ton of vitamin C into a product? If it is, they're going to do it. So I think it's really telling that they don't. Basically, the products, the foods, are designed to get you up to the recommended dietary intakes, but they're not giving their foods like extra boosts of vitamins in the way that many of us in the general public do when we take extra supplements for a purpose, like warding off colds.

[Dan Gallucci]

So we know when vitamins came around. But when do you start seeing the rise of the supplement industry?

[Katherine Price]

The rise of the supplement industry starts obviously when you have vitamins and pills as a possibility. And then it starts to expand in the 50s and 60s with a real explosion in the 70s. And that explosion is in part cultural because of, distrust of, quote, government or the pharmaceutical industry. And it's in part because of several celebrity influencers, to use a modern term, people who are really pushing supplement products as alternative ways to prevent or cure diseases.

[Jane Marie]

Who's the original Gwyneth Paltrow here?

[Dan Gallucci]

So one was a guy named Linus Pauling, who was a molecular chemist. He started saying things like vitamin C could prevent cancer. He had done some studies, studies that have since been Debunked by, among others, the Mayo Clinic.

[Jane Marie]

Common sense.

[Dan Gallucci]

Common sense. And then he wrote a book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold. And in that book he talked about vitamin C being able to cure the common cold. That's not true either. Does vitamin C ward off colds? From what you can tell, no.

[Katherine Price]

There's not been good research showing that vitamin C does anything to actually prevent colds. There's been like a little bit of evidence that maybe it will shorten the duration, but I don't think it's strong enough to warrant all the sales of airborne that are going on during cold season. With that said, if you're taking a sugar pill and you believe that it's going to prevent colds, it may actually prevent colds because the placebo effect is extremely strong. So in the case of vitamin C, I don't think most people are doing themselves a huge amount of harm by taking these vitamin C products. But it probably would be just as effective if someone tricked you and gave you just a pill with, I don't know, sugar in it.

[Jane Marie]

So Linus Pauling is the one to blame for emergency?

[Dan Gallucci]

Yeah, I mean, pretty much. It was at this point where there was something I kind of wanted to clear up about the terminology we're using here. Is there actually a difference between vitamins and supplements or are we kind of talking about the same thing?

[Katherine Price]

Dietary supplements and vitamins are not the same thing. Vitamins are dietary supplements when they're in pill form, but dietary supplements are not all vitamins. So again, there's 13 human vitamins, but there's more than, last time I checked, 87,000 dietary supplement products on the US market which do include vitamin products. But it is a category that goes way, way, way beyond just vitamins or their counterpart minerals. So a dietary supplement that can include weight loss products, sexual enhancement products, bodybuilding products, things like herbals and botanicals like St. John's Wort. It's a very wide ranging category, and you can see how big it is. And you can see some of the confusion. If you go into your local drugstore, for example, at Rite Aid, and you look at the names they put on the aisles, you'll often see that there's an aisle that's called vitamins, but it really should be labeled dietary supplements, because if you look at the products that are in that aisle, you will see that it is not just 13 letter vitamins. There's a crazy assortment, everything in GNC or vitamin shop, again using the word vitamin. Those are dietary supplements.

[Jane Marie]

I know, Catherine Just said it. But pause for a second and think about this. Close your eyes and imagine those beautiful white and yellow and green rows and rows and rows of pill bottles and tinctures and sprays and a million different brands and doses hanging out all over the vitamin aisles. Do we really need all that stuff

[Katherine Price]

in the 60s and 70s and then all the way up to the 90s? I would say the FDA is really trying to figure out a way to regulate supplement products, including vitamins, at the same time that that genre of product is exploding. So people are becoming more interested in them. At the same time. The FDA is basically like, oh, oh dear, wait, wait a second, like products are coming out that are not trying to replicate oranges. They're like trying to give vitamin C at crazy doses, like grams of vitamin C as opposed to milligrams or that contain different substances altogether, all lumped under vitamin. This doesn't seem like a great idea. We probably should have some rules just as we've got standards in place for enriched flour is versus non enriched flour or basic safety checks for like selling a toothpaste, you know, being sure that it's not going to burn the inside of someone's mouth. Like some kind of basic system here for this supplement market. And so they have a number of these attempts to change the way that the products are labeled in particular and also to set standards so that there's instructions for what a particular type of product should contain. Like what level of vitamins should it contain, if it's a vitamin C product or should there be a limit beyond which the product is going to have to be considered an over the counter drug instead of a supplement. So like if it's a vitamin C at a level that could be consumed in food, it's one thing. And if it's vitamin C at a level way beyond that, maybe it's not really a food like substance anymore and maybe now it's an over the counter drug. And that freaked out the nascent supplement industry and they managed to get a number of really influential pieces of legislation passed. One of those was the Proxmire Amendment in 1976, which basically forbid the FDA from ever setting standards or limits on what vitamin products could contain.

[Jane Marie]

This right here is what should freak you out the most. If you're wondering who's minding the store, the FDA truly tried. The fda, who we've mandated to do exactly this, make sure the products we're buying and putting in our bodies are safe. They tried to do that and the supplement industry saw it as an opportunity to say that the government was taking away your basic rights. So they threw a bunch of money at lobbyists and basically cut the FDA off at the knees while they were trying to do their jobs. So you and I and Dan, we're all on our own.

[Katherine Price]

So the FDA could not say, okay, you can't have beyond X amount of vitamin C per pill. And it couldn't say that a standard multivitamin, by definition, must contain all 13 vitamins and minerals. If you actually look at the supplement facts on the back of multivitamin products, you will see that they don't all contain even the same vitamins and minerals, especially gummies. And a lot of adults love gummy vitamins. But if you look at what vitamins the gummies contain, it's not the same as the chewables, and they're not the same as the ones that you swallow.

[Jane Marie]

I looked at the ingredients in Centrum Women's Multivitamin. That's the one you swallow. And Centrum Women's multigummies. One has 40% of your recommended daily intake of vitamin A, and while the other has 117%. One has 17% of your daily zinc, while the other has 73%. And one has 100% of your iron for the day, while the other contains no iron at all. You've heard of anemia, right? It's commonly caused by iron deficiency, and anemia is much more prevalent in women than men, especially when we're pregnant. So it's weird that a women's multivitamin wouldn't contain any iron. I'm not going to even bother telling you which one is which, because who cares? The manufacturer doesn't.

[Katherine Price]

And so the Proxmire Amendment blocked the FDA's ability to create a system where there would be consistency. So you start to have these various pieces of legislation that take more and more power away from the FDA and start to shift it into the hands of the supplement industry. And they do that in a really genius way where they get the American public and the consumers to work for the supplement industry by framing this entire debate as a matter of personal freedom and saying that the FDA wants to take your vitamins away. Even though the FDA never was trying to ban vitamin supplements and in many cases, what the dietary supplement industry is advocating for, they're not vitamins. They're dietary supplements. They're different substances.

[Jane Marie]

The supplement industry convinced the American public that keeping the FDA's hands tied was a matter of protection, personal liberty, instead of the industry going to the fda and being like, let's work together and make sure nobody you know dies from our products. They told the public, you can't trust the government. Does that sound familiar? So the Proxmire Amendment, that's 1976. And then in 1994, they did it again, only this time they had more money and more politicians on their side and they dug the hole even deeper.

[Katherine Price]

There are so many, so many products on the market and you can't even know necessarily what's in the products because in many cases they have so called proprietary blends that is basically like code terminology for secret because they don't tell you what those proprietary ingredients are. The example I use in my book, which I thought was very funny but also distressing, was this product called Natural Curves, which had a prominent photo of a woman's cleavage on it and then lots of uses of the word natural, natural, natural, natural. And then like its purpose was quite clear. And when I looked at the online reviews for this product, people were saying it did stuff like they were talking about breaking out in pimples like they did when they were in high school and they were talking about what it actually did do to their breasts. And then when they stopped taking it, like they went back to, I don't know, like deflated balloons. I forgot the terminology. Nonetheless, they gave it like a four and a half star rating. But I was like, this is where it gets scary because the best case scenario is that Natural Curves does not do anything to your body, but if it is giving you acne, it is doing something to your hormones.

[Jane Marie]

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher written and reported by me, Jane Marie and Dan Gallucci. Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson with production by Stephanie Kariuki and Lyra Smith. Our mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns. Please rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks for listening.

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[Sleep Number Customer]

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[Capital One Advertiser]

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[Sleep Number Announcer]

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[Capital One Advertiser]

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[Katherine Price]

Acast powers the world's Best Podcasts

[Dan Gallucci]

Here's a show that we recommend.

[Jane Marie]

You may have heard something somewhere about the crisis of recycling and the problem of microplastics, but have you heard about how scientists are discovering very cool and creative solutions to fight this problem? There is so much fake news about everything. I think that it is quite dangerous to talk about this, but microplastics are one of the biggest silent pollutions of all time and they are getting everywhere in the sea, in the soil, in the air and already inside our bodies. That was scientist and self described bacteria trainer Patricia Aima Maldonado. Hear a special interview for our fellow Friday series with her to find out the fascinating scientific and technological solutions she's working on to combat the invasive problem of microplastics. Listen only on TED Talks daily.

[Dan Gallucci]

ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

[Katherine Price]

Acast.com.