Company sells race-specific vitamins

[dogday]

Some critics see it as a marketing gimmick

The GenSpec brand of dietary supplements, proclaimed to be the "first genetically specific product line," aims distinct products at blacks, whites and Hispanics, and at men and women within each group.

GenSpec's multivitamins for African American and Hispanic males and females, for instance, contain higher amounts of vitamin D because, the Florida-based maker of the products says, the skin of darker-toned people doesn't make as much vitamin D from the sun as that of lighter-skinned people.

Because women have a higher risk of the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis than men, GenSpec's multivitamins for black, white and Hispanic women contain higher amounts of bone-enhancing calcium.

Unique "physiological and metabolic differences" can make certain groups more likely to develop some diseases, said Joseph Lander, president and founder of GenSpec. The small company, which also sells race-targeted weight-loss pills, bases its products on research into key racial health distinctions, Lander said. The company plans to start selling an Asian multivitamin in the next month.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12258169/

[hedgehog]

1. This sounds racist, but it might make sense

Rickets is making a come-back among darker skinned children living in Northern cities. Many of them are lactose intolerant so they aren't getting Vitamin D from dairy products and being bundled up six months a year in a cloudy city keeps them from getting enough sunlight to make Vitamin D on their own. Cod liver oil, anyone?

[Coexist]

2. but what are my poor mutts (very mixed race) children to do?!

and they call THEMSELVES mutts - I did not coin that for them. When they found out what mutt meant, they laughed and decided that is what they are.

[darkmaestro019]

4. Get a bottle of each and bite them in half? ; ) (nt)

[hedgehog]

6. Hey - go with what works

I've been checking out "black" hair care products for my curly hair.

[Squatch]

3. So?

Link

The different races *do* have physiological differences.

[darkmaestro019]

5. Yes, but saying so will get you called a racist, mostly due IMHO

to the fact that throughout history humanity seems to think "different" ALWAYS means someone has to be better and someone has to be worse. Inferior/superior, etc.

[Kingshakabobo]

7. I guess we had a big flame-war here yesterday when......

......some DUers had the NERVE to claim they can, sometimes, identify a person as African American by the sound of their voice.

[smartvoter]

12. That's ridiculous. Of course you can. And the same in reverse.

Some of this is just loopy. Despite attempts to pretend it doesn't exist, there are different races. Not superior or inferior, better or worse -- just different races. I can distinguish some African Americans by skin and/or the sound of their voices. I guarantee they can tell I'm white by my skin and the sound of my voice. We have different hair, too. Who the hell cares? I'm telling you right now I've got more in common with African Americans than anyone in the White House.

[Igel]

15. There was actually some research done a few years

ago for a class action suit. The biblography/abstract interface at the school I have search privileges through is down, so I can't look it up.

IIRC--and this is all from memory--there was a company selling something by phone. There was no reason for the racial distribution of the clients: almost all were white. The racial composition of the neighborhoods didn't matter. The phone lists they dialed were color blind; the service was decent, and offered at a fair price, and there was no reason that the service wouldn't have appealed to blacks as much as to whites. But blacks were excluded. Not so much Latinos, not Asians. The company asked how could they possibly be disciminating by race, since they never saw their customers until late in the game, *after* the discrimination was alleged to occur. So some forensic phoneticians were called in.

People could identify AAs with much greater than chance accuracy, and in follow-up questioning the subjects said it was the 'voice' of the people that recorded the stimuli. The subjects taking the tests were wrong, analysis showed: they were picking up on suble differences in accent, in effect identifying African-American English Vernacular speakers. Not all people IDed as black were black, AAEV shares many dialectal features with some Southern American dialects; and many blacks weren't identified. Asians and Latinos don't tend to use AAEV. But even many educated blacks have traces of it in their speech; not all, by any means.

I don't recall if voice quality accounted for any of the variance, or if the results were later disputed.

[Kingshakabobo]

16. Over-the-phone housing discrimination is a big problem.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200211/ai_n9114882


>>>>>"I wondered why I encountered difficulty when I showed up in person to rent an apartment," says Baugh, a professor of education and linguistics. "I assumed initially it was because they didn't know I was African American over the phone."


>>>>In the mid-1990s, he examined how prospective apartment renters are received over the phone, using dialects of American English - African American Vernacular English, Chicano English and Standard American English. He focused on five communities in the San Francisco Bay area and made a total of nearly 1,000 calls. Baugh phoned each rental office three times, with no more than 30 minutes between calls, using the same script ("Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.") alternating the voice he used each time. He also used a different first and last name and a different return telephone number for each dialect.

Baugh was generally able to get an appointment to see an available apartment when he used Standard American English, usually associated with that of a White person. Most often, the "African American" and "Hispanic" voice prompted the reply "there are no vacant apartments."

"There was a striking pattern of people turning down the ethnic <-sounding> voice," Baugh says. While being interviewed for this story, he adopted accents to demonstrate the voices he used during his telephone research.

[aden_nak]

8. It is first a question for science.

If there is scientific evidence to support the idea then I am open to it. And it's not hard to imagine that this concept is possible. I mean, certainly different people from different parts of the world have differnet diets, different ancestries, even slightly different evolutionary paths they've walked. Therefore it is not unimaginable that their bodies would function best with slightly different suppliments. I mean, if one group needs more iron and the other group needs more calcium, that's not really a matter of inferiority so much as it's a matter of health and nutrition.

[meow2u3]

9. This goes to show race is more than just skin color

People of different races have different metabolic rates. I read a few years ago of a doctor who adjusts his prescriptions for high blood pressure for blacks, whom he says needs half the medicine of non-blacks. What benefits whites, in the above example, may sicken or kill a black, and vice versa.

It's true that melanin is a vitamin D blocker. In a typical US climate, a light-skinned person should get enough vitamin D; a darker-skinned person might not get enough and worse yet, most non-whites are lactose intolerant, so they can't supplement their vitamin D intake via dairy products.

On the other hand, mixed-race people are not mentioned, and so how is that company going to specify vitamins for biracials?

[kitkat65]

10. There's vitamins for the different blood types (A, B, O, AB) too

I don't know if it's junk science or not but I think there are some diseases/disorders which affect only a particular race, such as sickle cell anemia.

[KurtNYC]

11. Most vitamins and supplements are wasted money anyway

"Research" my butt! Calcium supplements are ineffective against osteoperosis and increase the risk of kidney stones (see the Harvard Nurse Study with over 91,000 participants). Vitamin A is lethal in high doses and causes health problems at doses above 50,000IU.

People of any race are far better off eating well than spending good money on supplements which are ineffective at best.

[DUHandle]

13. Color negative films

used to be balanced for Caucasian skin tones.

Whether or not they still are I couldn’t tell you.

[bobbieinok]

17. interesting...do you have sources or links for this?????

[DUHandle]

18. I used to work in a camera store

and I got the info from the Fuji rep, who brought in samples.

To tell you the truth, we used to look into the envelopes of finished prints, and not for the most faithful rendition of skins tones I'll add, and found it to be true.

Sorry, no links.

[OzarkDem]

14. Snake oil salesmen n/t