Viagra-laced 'erectile honey' is flooding into France, officials warn

Hm ok...

Nobody should be buying one product and getting different ingredients inside.

I don’t think that follows from two anecdotes. There is plenty of natural remedies which have an effect. Just thinking of the simplest, least controversial one: packing citrus fruits for a long voyage does indeed prevent scurvy.

There are a surprising number of herbs that do something within the body. However, that something is usually mild and mixed in with a large number of other effects. Supplement companies now play games where they try to extract, isolate, and condense the natural product into those active chemicals with various degrees of success, but even the extracts don’t escape the problems of off-target effects and liver or kidney load.

I was surprised to hear from a doctor about how often they see patients who choose traditional Chinese medicine or other herbalist practices and end up with elevated liver markers or signs of kidney trouble.

The supplement world is also embracing a lot of gray market medications now. You can buy “supplements” that are actually just experimental drugs that haven’t been fully researched yet, but some enterprising person had a lab in China synthesized it and now sells it on their website.

For a while, supplement vendors were even synthesizing commercial drugs and then just selling them as powders, amazingly. You could go buy little jars of drugs like Memantine (a prescription medication) from supplement vendors. The current mod team of /r/Nootropics on Reddit also runs one of the popular supplement vendors on Reddit (surprise) and they were recently hit for breaking some laws around labeling their supplements, which is a slap on the wrist relative to their past history of selling full pharmaceuticals, addictive substances like phenibut, and opioid medications like Tianeptine as “supplements”

Of course, they cracked down on any threads discussing their legal troubles on Reddit and they’ve replaced it with stories about how they’re actually the victims, with a lot of bans being handed out on /r/Nootropics for people who disagreed. It’s wild to witness how the supplement industry works and how effectively they’ve captured online discussion in their favor.