When it comes to something as life and death important as to what to feed ourselves and our families,

we should rely not on anecdotes, but on facts.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Delivers a crucial organ in the body playing vitriol and metabolism, detoxification,

digestion, blood sugar regulation, and vitamin storage.

Today we start with a story about the liver damage caused by herbal life supplements.

Herbalife is a multi-billion dollar multi-level marketing supplement company that was forced to pay hundreds of millions

of dollars to settle charges of deception and corrupt business practices. It also holds the distinction

of being the dietary supplement most frequently implicated in injuring the livers of consumers.

Herbal does not mean innocuous.

Cases of severe liver toxicity associated with herbal life supplements started to be published in 2007 around the world.

As the accompanying editorial summarized, there were 22 cases of liver damage following herbal

life intake in the first two reports, with two patients developing

fulminate liver failure requiring liver transplantation, only one survived.

The editorial concluded that this clearly shifts the risk-benefit ratio against its use.

Maybe it's contaminated with chemicals or heavy metals, maybe due to

contamination with a liver-toxic bacteria found in implicated products. Additional reports continued

to be published, followed by rebuttals written by Herbalife Company representatives questioning

cause and effect. No small task given that people were

taking up to 17 different herbal life products at one time.

So how strong is the evidence?

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