Mar 23, 2019
Vidcast: https://youtu.be/qPrjwtIsFvM
Ninety percent of the most popular prescription medications in the US contain one or more ingredients that may make you sick. Now, I’m not talking about the main or so-called active ingredient but rather about the inactive ingredients that are added to pills, capsules, and liquids to improve shelf life, absorption, and taste.
A study just released by collaborators from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT analyzed some 42,000 oral medications and their nearly 350,000 inactive ingredients. The investigators pinpointed 3 troublesome inactive ingredients that appear most often.
Forty-five percent of medications contain lactose, 33% contain one or another food dye, and up to 0.1% contain peanut oil. This latter ingredient that could be life threatening for those with peanut allergies.
To make matters worse, there are countless versions of the same prescription drug by different manufacturers that contain different inactive ingredients. If you are an allergic individual, check drug labels and question your pharmacist about the inactive ingredients in the medication you are given.
Those with allergies should always have an antihistamine like Benadryl handy, and those with severe allergies should carry Epipens or their generic equivalents.
Daniel Reker, Steven M. Blum, Christoph Steiger, Kevin E. Anger, Jamie M. Sommer, John Fanikos and Giovanni Traverso. Inactive” ingredients in oral medications. Science Translational Medicine, 2019 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aau6753
#inactiveingredients #allergy #fooddye #lactose #peanut