Methylsynephrine is not a naturally occurring substance, but a medicine that the pharmaceutical industry has now rejected because it was too risky. The substance is found in a number of slimming supplements – sometimes in higher concentrations than the pharmaceutical industry ever dared use for their products, writes American researcher Pieter Cohen in Drug Testing and Analysis.
Methylsynephrine is also called oxilofrine or para-hydroxylephedrine. It’s a synthetic compound, developed in the 1930s by German chemists as a stimulant. The chemical was available in some countries as a medicine against high blood pressure, in products usually containing 16-40 mg methylsynephrine.
Methylsynephrine is not a naturally occurring substance, but a medicine that the pharmaceutical industry has now rejected because it was too risky. The substance is found in a number of slimming supplements – sometimes in higher concentrations than the pharmaceutical industry ever dared use for their products, writes American researcher Pieter Cohen in Drug Testing and Analysis.
Legitimate pharmaceutical companies no longer produce methylsynephrine. The risk of side effects such as high blood pressure, stroke, raised heartbeat, sleep disturbances and psychological problems is too high. Methylsynephrine is on the doping list.
In supplements
If the pharmaceutical industry drops a substance that has been found to be too dangerous, then you can guarantee that a supplements manufacturer somewhere will start putting the same substance in capsules and powders, even if it’s a compound not found in nature. And that has happened with methylsynephrine too.
Study
Cohen bought 27 different supplements that were labelled as containing methylsynephrine, and measured the amount of the stuff that the products contained. Nearly all of them were slimming supplements.
Let’s recap
Five supplements (HyperDrive, Shredder, Fastin, Lean Pills en Tummy Tuck) contained higher doses of methylsynephrine than the pharmaceutical industry deemed acceptable when methylsynephrine was still on the market as a medicine.
Almost half of all the supplements contained not a trace of methylsynephrine.
It was also striking that, for the few products that declared the amount of methylsynephrine on the label, the amount was not correct. In all these cases the substance was either not present or only there in minute quantities.
Cohen’s discoveries are worrying to say the least. You can guess how the supplements industry has reacted to his findings.
If all the scoundrels working in the supplements industry lived in Gotham City, then Bruce Wayne wouldn’t don a rubber suit at night but a white lab overall. And he wouldn’t call himself Batman either, but Pieter Cohen.
Pharmaceutical doses of the banned stimulant oxilofrine found in dietary supplements sold in the USA
Abstract
Oxilofrine (4-[1-hydroxy-2-(methylamino)propyl]phenol) is a pharmaceutical stimulant prescribed in dosages of 16 to 40?mg to stimulate the heart and increase blood pressure. It has never been approved for use in the USA as a prescription drug or as a dietary supplement. Several athletes, however, have been banned from sport for testing positive for oxilofrine and have claimed that they inadvertently consumed oxilofrine in sports supplements. Consumption of supplements containing oxilofrine may also pose serious health risks. For example, one brand of supplements containing oxilofrine has been linked to serious adverse events including vomiting, agitation, and cardiac arrest. We designed our study to determine the presence and quantity of oxilofrine in dietary supplements sold in the USA. A validated ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time of flight-mass spectrometry method was developed for the identification and quantification of oxilofrine. The separation was achieved using a reversed phase column, mass spectrometry detection, and a water/acetonitrile gradient as the mobile phase. The presence of oxilofrine was confirmed using a reference standard. We analyzed 27 brands of supplements labelled as containing a synonym of oxilofrine (‘methylsynephrine’) and found that oxilofrine was present in 14 different brands (52%) at dosages ranging from 0.0003 to 75?mg per individual serving. Of the supplements containing oxilofrine, 43% (6/14) contained pharmaceutical or greater dosages of oxilofrine. Following instructions on the label, consumers could ingest as much as 250?mg of oxilofrine per day. The drug oxilofrine was found in pharmacological and greater dosages in supplements labelled as containing methylsynephrine.
Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dta.1976/abstract/
