New vitamin line for blacks and Hispanics puts focus on ethnicity's role in health

By Kathleen Kerr
N.Y. Newsday
(April 14, 2006) The way Joey Lander tells it, African-Americans and Hispanics have unique nutritional needs and his new line of multivitamin pills can help fill them.

Lander is president of a Cross City, Fla., company that has begun marketing vitamins targeted at racial and ethnic groups. Though Lander also has a law practice, he devotes most of his time to the vitamin company, GenSpec.

While supplement companies have tailored vitamins to various groups - men, women, older people, for example, the concept of race-based health care products is new -- and controversial.

Some experts dispute the idea of a vitamin keyed to one race or ethnic group, and there are no official recommendations for such groups to take only multivitamins designed specifically for them.

But Lander says GenSpec's vitamins are "genetically specific" and contain the precise amount of calcium and Vitamin D required by Hispanics and African-Americans, based on recommended daily allowances.

Lander also says African-Americans don't absorb Vitamin D well from the sun because their darker skin color blocks it; there have been some studies to support that. Most multivitamins do contain lower amounts of calcium and Vitamin D than those sold by GenSpec. But there are few other differences that set GenSpec's supplements apart from other multivitamin brands.

Lander said during an interview that he and his partners have invested $5 million in GenSpec, which has developed one multivitamin for Hispanics and one for African-Americans; there is also a multivitamin for Caucasians. His goal is to put GenSpec products on pharmacy shelves across the country.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration came under fire after approving BiDil, a medication for heart failure in African-Americans. It was the first time a drug had been approved for a specific racial group.

NitroMed, the Massachusetts manufacturer of BiDil, had run a trial showing a 43 percent reduction in mortality in a small group of African-Americans - 1,050 people - who used it.

Critics blasted the FDA and NitroMed saying the BiDil trial was too small and that approval of the drug had opened the door to defining African-Americans as biologically different from other people. BiDil, however, won the support of the Association of Black Cardiologists and the American Heart Association.

Now, Lander said, GenSpec has launched an advertising campaign urging African-Americans and Hispanics to buy its multivitamins, priced at $17.99 for a 30-day supply.

"Before our product, vitamins were basically one-size-fits-all," Lander said. "By providing therapeutic levels of vital nutrients, GenSpec has the potential to help prevent certain diseases."

Lander has not tested the effectiveness of GenSpec's vitamins. Instead, he points to various studies that have found calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies in some African-Americans and Hispanics.

Although Lander does have a Caucasian vitamin line, GenSpec's promotional materials are clearly aimed at African-Americans and Hispanics. And Lander says he's arranged advertising in magazines for African-Americans and on a television network catering to Hispanics.

Dr. Brent Bauer, an associate professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., and an expert on herbs and dietary supplements, says that saying vitamin deficiencies are genetically determined is "a big stretch." Bauer says vitamin deficiencies can occur in individuals as a result of food preferences, income levels and even where they live.

"They've taken a nugget of a good idea and run a bit too far afield," Bauer said. "The whole concept seems to me very market-driven rather than based on scientific study. It borders on the offensive."

Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, a cardiologist and chief medical officer at Clinilabs, a Manhattan research group, served on the FDA committee that recommended approval of BiDil. Sackner-Bernstein says he voted to approve BiDil but still has reservations about racially targeted products.

"With BiDil your debate is: Do I know that it's really specific in its benefits to African-Americans, or is that something that could be interpreted as a shortcut to get the drug to market?" Sackner-Bernstein said.

Assuming certain doses of minerals and vitamins can help an entire group of people, he said, is risky.

"Many vitamins can be dangerous, and some vitamins can be dangerous at doses that we consider to be standard ones," Sackner-Bernstein said. But because the government doesn't regulate vitamins the way it does drugs, he added, it is easier for supplement companies to make claims and put products on the market.

Troy Duster, a professor of sociology at New York University, criticized the idea of racially targeted health care products. He gave the keynote address last week at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference on the promises and pitfalls of race-based medicine.

"I think what's going on here is market niche: trying to find biomarkers for biomarketing," Duster said in an interview. "I don't think there's much doubt what the motives are about."

Duster noted that NitroMed decided to market BiDil to African-Americans only after the drug failed to show efficacy in earlier trials that were not racially limited. He says BiDil should have been tested on a much larger group of African-Americans.

And Duster wonders which GenSpec vitamins African-Americans who speak Spanish are supposed to take and how the company defines Hispanic.

Dr. Mariana Markell, a nephrologist and director of complementary and alternative medicine for the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, says some studies suggest African-Americans might benefit from more Vitamin D. But she said that is most effectively remedied through dietary changes.

"I think what people really need to do is get most of their nutrition through foodstuffs," Markell said. "It's very, very difficult to take one substance and say this is good and you should take a lot of this."

Markell said vitamins and minerals act differently in pill forms and in foods. She noted that while calcium in pill forms can can cause kidney stones, calcium in dairy products most often does not. And, she said, Vitamin D deficiency is "highly prevalent" across all racial groups.

Lander said in a telephone interview that he plans to sell GenSpec vitamins in stores across the country and that the pills are on the way to the Walgreens chain.

But Walgreens spokeswoman Carol Hively said: "We do not sell any GenSpec products and do not have plans at this time to do so."


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