Epakitin - Veterinary nutritional woo.

[John Bentley]

I am a veterinarian and I recently had a client of mine come to me with her dog in kidney failure. She had taken the dog to a clinic in another town while she was traveling. The veterinarian there gave her a medicine bottle full of Epakitin. I had never heard of the stuff, so I started researching it. It turns out that it is made up of lactose, calcium carbonate, and chitosan. I had never heard of chitosan, so I looked that up. It appears to be ground up crab and shrimp shells.

That substance used to be marketed as a magic "fat absorber" and cholesterol reducer, but was taken out of that market when the FTC sued people for false advertising claims.

Does anyone know what sort of twisted rationale is being used to market it as a "kidney health enhancer"? I cannot conceive of any renal function enhancement they could possibly claim. At least the "fat absorber" claim made some sense in that if you put lipids and chitin in a test tube, the chitin will bind to the lipids.

[Dragonrock]

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act allowed the sale of natural substances as long as two basic conditions are met:

1) The substance must be safe when used as directed.
2) No specific health claims can be made.

This allowed every fraud, kook, twit, and con-man to pop up out of the woodwork and sell anything they could stick in a pill, mix in a gel, or dissolve in water. There is no basis behind any of their claims, but as long as they say something like "supports kidney health" then they haven't made a specific health claim and they can sell anything.