Supplements often still contain banned ingredients

When the Food and Drug Administration recalls your "all natural" dietary supplement for containing prescription drugs, you might think that ensures a rapid restoration of the misbranded product to its wholesome state, right?

Wrong, says a new study.

Several months after supplements were recalled for being illegally laced with prescription drugs, researchers bought them off the shelves and from the online inventories of supplement retailers and checked whether they still contained the illegal substances.

In two-thirds of cases, they did.

And in more than one in five cases, researchers found at least one additional illegal ingredient in the recalled products. Either the supplement maker had doubled down in the face of the FDA recall, adding more illegal ingredients, or the FDA had failed to flag the other drugs in the first place.

Of 27 dietary supplements sampled by a team led by Pieter A. Cohen, 13 were sports-enhancement nutritional supplements, and 11 of them - 85 percent - still contained prescription ingredients, including anabolic steroids. Of nine weight-loss products sampled, six still contained prescription medications.

The recalled products typically included sibutramine (marketed as Meridia) or phenolphthalein, a laxative being withdrawn from over-the-counter medications as a possible carcinogen. Sibutramine was withdrawn from the market in 2010 after the FDA found it increased the risk of cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack. - L.A. Times