So you want to get whiter?

(Second of 3-part series)

Glutathione is today’s most popular and most effective ingredient in capsules and pills of food supplements.  Glutathione is not primarily a whitener.  It is actually an anti-oxidant that happens to have the side effect of  lightening the skin.  It is the ingredient widely advertised as the lightening agent in almost all food supplement brands marketed today worldwide.  Dermatologists recommend taking 500 mg as much as three times daily for maximum effect.  And this has to be maintained.  I tried taking glutathione in the past and it did make me much lighter in skin tone.  But once I stopped, my natural color almost immediately returned to normal (a skin tone which, by the way, I have come to adore as it is.  I even go out to tan myself these days).  Logically, if the intake of glutathione is in smaller doses and less frequent then the lightening effect is retarded and you would have to buy a lot more bottles to catch up on the skin tone you desire.

The complainant “Alias Jane” is one of the millions of women in statistics worldwide, (concentrated in Asia and much more concentrated in the Philippines) who want to become white.  I imagine that actresses Kris Aquino and Lucy Torres are her idols.  She bought the brand Vaniderm from Home TV Shopping and consumed four bottles of, supposedly, 500 mg gluta content capsules.  Growths suddenly erupted on her face.  Upon investigation, independent sampling was done on Vaniderm and competition MET Tathione at the BFAD accredited lab, PIPAC.  September 2007 results showed MET passing with 500 mg gluta content and Vaniderm — with practically no glutathione content at the time —  a miserable failure.

 This prompted our more serious investigation in April 2008 on several brands of food supplement brands claiming gluta content of 100 mg to 750 mg per capsule. Nine brands were bought from different leading drugstores in the metropolis.  These were all sent sealed and marked to the Philippine Institute of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the Ateneo de Manila University for a process called HPLC — the most accurate in determining glutathione content in samples.  As the PIPAC Director himself stated, “We don’t care about the brands, we don’t care about their claims.  We only test for actual glutathione content and these are our results.  We tested these samples three times”.

The PIPAC results, once broadcasted, was like a hornet’s nest accidentally nudged.  Clearly stated was the fact that only two out of the nine samples sent to PIPAC claimed true to actual glutathione content in their capsules!  MET Tathione and Gluta White Food Supplement passed and even exceeded by a few mg their claim of 250 mg and  500 mg respectively. White L-Glutathione claims 700 mg but registered only 166 mg. Active White Plus Glutathione claims 500 mg and only had 219 mg. Gluta White and Firm claims 540 mg and has 476 mg (I am told this may be considered a passing mark give or take 5% from claim). Cosmo Skin claims 500 mg and had only 290 mg. And the top three failures are Lucida DS and Vaniderm both claiming 500 mg but had only 4.4 and 5.4 mg each.  Worst was the brand Kyusoku Bihaku claiming 500 mg but has onlt 0.49 mg.

There isn’t much that could be done about the facts. ABS-CBN News decided to air the results— including the actual brands in the study.  To be clear, the samples were from one bottle in only one batch or lot number per brand. But remember that our study of Vaniderm in 2007 already showed that it hardly had any gluta content at all.  And that since 2007, there is now a consistent recording of substandard content, at least for this brand under United Shelter.  Lucida DS would later join its sister brand in substandard notoriety. 

Food supplement industry insiders tell me that United Shelter has a consistent history and reputation for being substandard and that it baffles them how these brands continue to merit MFAD approval and has even taken the lead in sales among such products in the market. I was referred to an American doctor by one of these industry people. Dr. Theodore Hersch of Thione International is, according to his curriculum vitae, an esteemed physician associated with the biggest hospitals in the US, is a Harvard graduate and author of several books on Medicine.  His business is developing and producing glutathione products and marketing wholesale to buyers and distributors worldwide. He was invited to the Philippines by United Shelter to give talks and seminars on glutathione. He brought back home with him a few samples of Lucida DS.  A client of his later reported to him that Lucida Ds was found with almost no glutathione content at all.  He couldn’t believe it.  He decided to have his own samples of Lucida DS analyzed at SGS International, one of the biggest and most credible independent laboratories found worldwide.  The results in 2007 on two separate samples from two different lot numbers/batches and with an expiry date of 2011: One sample showed a little over only 4 mg of glutathione and the other with only 2.89 mg of glutathione per capsule.  Hersch came out on Philippine national tv via phonepatch and declared he would be willing to come here to testify against what he called, “grossly unethical practices”.

Since then more and more evidence have trickled in against Lucida DS and all other United Shelter products — especially since this company put out full page paid advertisements against the report with personal attacks on your truly.  Mercury Drug, the country’s largest chain of drugstores, had pulled out Lucida DS from its shelves reportedly because it wanted to conduct its own tests before selling this brand again.  Amid all of the evidence the new question arises:  How could this happen?  How could the BFAD have not seen this and allowed it to go on and on? 

There might be an answer to that  —— in the last of our three-part series. (To be continued)