It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show where our mission is to serve

you and empower you to make better financial decisions in your life.

That question, how many supplements or dietary or herbal remedies do you take every day?

Most of us do take one or several or a whole boatload of them.

You know that they're really unregulated and there's things you gotta know about

when you can trust and when you can't trust what's on the label of that dietary supplement

or herbal remedy you're taking.

And later, how about finally some good news on the financial front?

I have some good news about the second most expensive thing in our lives.

What we spend on our vehicles.

So the thing with dietary supplements and herbal remedies is it's pretty much a thing of trust.

And unfortunately, independent study after independent study finds that that trust is being broken.

That when the ingredients are analyzed for herbal remedies and dietary supplements,

almost always they don't have what the label says they have and they might have other things the label doesn't mention.

So you think you're taking one thing and you're ending up with something else.

And there are any of a number of reasons why this happens. It's just a fact that it does happen.

Because the Congress and its wisdom about a generation and a half ago made the decision to allow

herbal remedies and dietary supplements to basically be free market, free of any government oversight, regulation or control.

That's a different thing than with prescription meds and was kind of a reaction to how the FDA is a really, really slow, deliberate bureaucracy

that seems to take forever to ever say a med is okay to be taken.

And so the cost of prescription meds are much, much higher because the FDA gauntlet is so extremely difficult.

And so what happens is the FDA system came about because the problems long ago with prescription meds,

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