Big Suppla

Cranking about “Big Pharma” while giving the supplements industry a free pass really chaps my arse. It’s not that the pharmaceutical industry is innocent — certainly not! Scandals galore. Seriously major issues, even. (See Bad Pharma, by one of my favourite authors.) But paranoia about Big Pharma has reached a fever pitch that isn’t even remotely proportionate to the problem, and the most shrill critics seem unable to comprehend that the supplements industry — let’s call them “Big Suppla” — is both insanely profitable and much more unregulated and corrupt.

The double standard is maddening.

This post was inspired by a new study published today in the British Medical Journal, which (yet again) scientifically slams the dynamic duo of supplements, glucosamine and chondroitin, and which noted that studies funded by Big Suppla tend to produce results that were — here’s a shocker — biased in favour of supplements.