Echinacea won't keep the winter colds away

I threw away my bottle of echinacea last Thursday.

The herbal supplement has not been proven to work and can be dangerous to your health, according to the knowledgeable graduate students of Writing for Health and Fitness.

Since I was one of the many people under the false impression that echinacea was the super herb that would make sure I never got sick and if by some slim chance I couldn't dodge the flu bullet, echinacea would cure me instantly like when Superman gets shot (well, maybe not that instantly), I decided to look deeper and find out how I had been duped.

According to ConsumerLab.com, echinacea is believed to help reduce the symptoms of colds and flu-like illnesses through short-term stimulation of the immune system. However, the drug has NOT been proven in preventing disease and is not recommended for long term use.

CL tested five echinacea products themselves and found the following results:

- One product had excessive lead contamination, containing more than 2.5 grams of lead per daily serving exceeding the California state limit above which a warning label is required. While this amount does not trigger a health problem for adults by itself, it unnecessarily contributes to lead exposure. In addition, this product contained higher than expected amounts of cichoric acid and lower than expected levels of echinacoside. This suggest that the product was made with either the wrong plant species or the wrong part of the echinacea plant.

- Four products CL test were low in phenols, the plant chemicals used to judge the quality of echinacea. The belief is high phenols equals higher potency.

- One product contained less than 5 percent phenols, and 50 percent and the third 75 percent of the claimed phenols. Ever though that last two contain the minimum amount required by the CL test, they still mislead consumers into believing that the product is more potent.

- The fourth product claimed to contain .8 percent to 1.2 percent echinacide and 3 percent to 4 percent total polyphenols. Yet consumer lab found .5 percent echinacide and .7 percent polyphenols, which are concentrations lower than the minimums expected for good quality echinacea.

In addition, echinacea can contain microbes that can cause disease - not prevent it.

So the knowledgeable graduate students were right, supplements are not always the super drugs they're cracked up to be. They can be expensive, ineffective and sometimes harmful. Even though half the population takes at least one supplement, according to Brittany and Adam, the FDA does not regulate these products before they reach stores.

In the words of Dane Cook, " ... when you see somebody walking down the street wearing a Superman t-shirt, you just want to shoot them in the chest ... when they start to bleed go, "I guess not" ... "

Just like a Superman t-shirt doesn't make you immune to bullet wounds, echinacea won't make you immune to colds or the flu.