Now this is something which makes me chuckle: One class of useless “natural” product which is being sold on a number of websites and other outlets is “trace mineral supplements.” Basically these are tablets which contain “trace minerals” which are according to one seller are: essential to our nutritional health but not obtainable in our daily lives. They are priced over a huge range, although on some sites they’re only $15 a bottle.

There is some truth to certain minerals or other substances being necessary or beneficial to good health, but only required in tiny amounts to get the job done. These would include such things as copper, zinc and iodine. Of course, there are also other minerals, like bismuth, which are not necessary but don’t seem to cause much in the way of harm or toxicity. But many of these “trace mineral” supplements contain a lot of stuff which is downright bad for you and isn’t useful or necessary in any dose. Will it cause harm? I doubt it would do much, because the levels are quite low. However, this is not homeopathic, so it should contain actual measurable amounts of what is listed. Some of these include:

aluminum, antimony, barium, beryllium, bismuth, boron, bromine, cadmium, calcium, cerium, cesium, chlorine, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, erbium, europium, fluorine, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, gold, hafnium, holmium, indium, iodine, iridium, iron, lanthanum, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, neodymium, nickel, niobium, osmium, palladium, phosphorus, platinum, potassium, praseodymium, rhenium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, samarium, scandium, selenium, silicon, silver, sodium, sulfur, tantalum, tellurium, terbium, thallium, thorium, thulium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zinc and zirconium.

Well damn! Beryllium is not good for you in any dose. And while calcium and copper might be somewhat useful, silver, tungsten and tin are not going to do much good.

But here are some of my favorites:

Uranium - I wonder if any of the people who go around claiming that uranium is so deadly that even a few nanograms from depleted-uranium munitions can cause major harm to communities in Iraq take these supplements. There’s probably just as much uranium in these.

Thorium – Another radioactive and toxic mineral.

Thallium - Used in rat poison. Toxic heavy metal.

Bromine – Highly Toxic

And of course, cadmium, chromium, zirconium and all the others which range from toxic to useless.

So how much of these are in the actual pills?

I doubt very much. It sounds like they just throw in some dirt and list all the trace elements in it. How much is in these tablets ranges depending on the mineral, but some are assuredly very low, because it contains gold, platinum and numerous other materials which would just be too damn expensive to put more than micrograms in.

I doubt there would be much harm from the trace minerals, although one supplement I saw does warn of having enough iron to be dangerous for children. Depending on how much of the other stuff they have in them this ranges from worthless to harmful. However, despite the fact that the levels are probably too low to cause acute toxicity, they still are high enough to make the products illegal to sell in California, due to state mandated limits on arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury in products for human consumption.

In any case, based on what is in these things, they range in effect from absolutely worthless to downright harmful.

I just find it so endlessly ironic that people complain about “heavy metals” and “toxins” and other “chemicals” which they are exposed to in daily life and many would turn around and take a supplement which actually does contain the same things they see as harmful, and quite possibly in larger amounts than one would be exposed to in general. How many take these tabs and then turn around and say “Oh don’t vaccinate my kid. THE MERCURY!”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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