Official evidence shows that natural dietary supplements are safe

ZERO fatalities from dietary supplement use
Whilst similar official data does not appear to be available in the UK or EU, the well respected US National Poisons Control Centre (NPCC) maintains meticulous official annual records of fatalities from a wide spectrum of substances. Their latest complete and published annual report is for 2013 and shows ZERO fatalities and no known serious adverse reactions attributable to any type of natural dietary supplements. This contrasts sharply with the figures for properly prescribed and administered prescription drugs which accounted for 128,000 fatalities and 2.7 million serious adverse reactions annually with many millions hospitalised. Despite these figures, vested interests continue to insist that dietary supplements pose issues to our health. This is just not true and calls into question the true motives of those who perpetuate these misleading claims.

Millions adversely affected by prescription drugs
The 2013 report from NPCC is a 251 page report that carefully documents 2.2 million individual cases of toxic contact or ingestion collected from 55 regional centres. Since 1983 more than 60 million toxic exposures have been reported with a number of fatalities but during all that time none of the fatalities have been directly attributed to the use of any dietary supplement.
The 128,000 fatalities and 2.7 million serious adverse reactions from prescribed drugs are for those that have been properly prescribed and administered. It does not include prescription drug abuse, such as taking more than is recommended or those that are self-prescribed. There are no officially published figures for these abuses but it can be assumed that they will add significantly to the totals of fatalities and serious harm.

Too much financial muscle?
Multi-national pharmaceutical corporations invest vast sums developing and promoting their new products. Whilst it is not improper to expect a return on those investments, some of the methods employed to achieve that return may often be considered as questionable. It seems that their financial muscle is increasingly being wielded to sway public (and medical) opinion away from inexpensive and safe natural dietary supplements and point them towards their often over-priced and considerably less safe synthetic products.

Biased clinical data?
A highly respected US University professor writing for the Harvard University Centre for Ethics is quoted as saying that published medical literature that was once considered a rock solid unbiased source for clinical guidelines and protocols, has now become nothing more than another marketing tool for the pharmaceutical corporations. This includes the manipulation of clinical trials by their marketing departments to ensure that released data is selectively shown in the most favourable light. The situation is further exacerbated by their apparent funding of official bodies tasked with impartially policing both pharmaceutical drugs and natural dietary supplements, resulting in what are considered by many to be deliberately biased guidelines.

Honest dietary supplement companies pay the price
The corporations are also believed to employ substantial and well funded teams of science writers, editors and statisticians who are tasked with ensuring that all clinical and editorial output always furthers their goals of market dominance and ever-increasing corporate profits. The result is that widely published so-called scholarly articles are effectively sanitised in favour of the pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of respectable smaller companies selling honest natural dietary supplements that have safely benefited countless millions of people worldwide for many decades.

Acknowledgement to NaturalHealth365 for some source material.