Concern about new health-food line

Press, 26 October 1984, Page 3

Concern about new health-food line

PA Auckland The eating of bottled bulls’ testes and other ani-mal-gland , products concerns a leading gastro-en-terologist. An associate professor at the Auckland Medical School, Professor Cliff Tas-man-Jones, said yesterday that he was worried about a new line of health foods and supplements being produced in Christchurch. They included bottled tablets made from freeze-dried glands, including the adrenal, thyroid, lymph, testes, ovaries, thymus, brain, pancreas, kidney, spleen, heart, and liver from cattle and sheep.

The glands are extracted in Invercargill by the Alliance Freezing Company, which also supplies raw gland powders to the United States, and are. put into tablet form by Megavitamin Laboratories in Christchurch. The director of Megavitamin Laboratories, a nutritionist, Dr Warren Stewart, said that the the raw glands provided what vitamins and minerals could not — enzymes and essential amino acids. People were not wincing

at the thought of buying bottled bull testes. “It is just the same as buying liver at the butcher’s,” he said. Dr Stewart said that some vegetarian naturopaths were initially opposed to giving out the raw glands but had changed their minds when they saw they could help. A pamphlet advertising the tablets said they provided a “complete source of nutrients that aim to improve the local nutritional environment of our body’s glands and organs. These concentrates seem to have a targeting effect and cause an increased gland-organ activity.” But Professor TasmanJones was dubious. “They have the potential for being harmful, depending on which hormone is involved. If you have too much, it suppresses the normal gland function,” he said.

Professor Tasman-Jones challenged the manufacturer to show that people taking the tablets had an identified deficiency in their gland activity , which the health food could remedy. The tablets were marketed .as a health food, not registered drugs, he said.