GNC to pull all ephedra items from shelves

General Nutrition Corp., a Pittsburgh-based retail chain that operates 5,300 General Nutrition Centers in the United States, including 32 in San Diego County, said it will pull all ephedra supplements by the end of June.

The amphetamine-like herb, which promotes weight loss, also can raise blood pressure and increase the heartbeat to dangerous levels. Studies have linked ephedra to about 100 deaths, as well as numerous heart attacks and strokes.

GNC acknowledged it is embroiled in legal actions over ephedra, but the decision to drop the products was a "consumer demand issue," the company said. Last year, GNC sales of ephedra products dropped 40 percent.

"We believe that ephedra-based products are safe when used as directed," said Michael Meyers, GNC's president and CEO. "Nonetheless, the current business climate dictates that we move in a different direction."

One of GNC's leading ephedra products is Xenadrine RFA-1, the diet pill that gained national notoriety in February when it was linked to the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler.

Cytodyne Technologies, the maker of Xenadrine, said in a written statement that it has "no direct response to GNC's announcement." Cytodyne said it stopped producing and selling its ephedra product in April.

It was partly in response to Bechler's death that the Food and Drug Administration in February proposed new warning labels on all ephedra products. Some consumer groups and medical experts are lobbying for tougher action, such as a ban or a prescription-only restriction on ephedra.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, a spokesman for Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C., consumer watchdog group that supports an ephedra ban, said the FDA should follow GNC's lead.

"These retailers may be having difficulty getting insurance – if you know what everyone else knows about ephedra and continue to sell it, you're liable," Wolfe said. "But whatever the reason, companies dropping ephedra are smarter than the FDA, which still allows this dangerous product to remain on the market."

A GNC spokeswoman said the company's corporate-owned stores do not carry the nation's top-selling ephedra product, San Diego-based Metabolife International's Metabolife 356, but she said some of GNC's 1,360 franchisee-owned stores might stock it.

Jan Strode, a spokeswoman for Metabolife, said GNC's action has "no significant impact on our business."

Yet the continuing ephedra debacle has taken its toll on Metabolife. Annual sales of Metabolife 356 topped $84 million at the end of March, making it the top selling brand – but those sales were off 30 percent from last year, according to Information Resources, a Chicago-based firm that tracks retail sales.

With yesterday's announcement, GNC joins a growing number of ephedra companies and retail stores abandoning ephedra, in part because of soaring liability insurance costs and hundreds of lawsuits alleging ephedra-related injuries.

GNC has been named in consumer lawsuits against Xenadrine's maker, New Jersey-based Cytodyne Technologies, as well as in lawsuits filed against MuscleTech Research & Development, the maker of Hydroxycut, another ephedra product that GNC used to carry. MuscleTech stopped selling its ephedra product last year.

In January, the 7-Eleven Corp. and EAS, a major manufacturer of diet supplements, announced they would stop selling ephedra products. Twinlab Corp., which sold ephedra supplements under the brands Ripped Fuel and Metabolift, switched to ephedra-free supplements in March.

Metabolife, which is the subject of a federal investigation into whether the company lied about ephedra's safety when it failed to disclose thousands of consumer health complaints, launched its own ephedra-free supplement in December. The company, which faces more than 100 product liability lawsuits, continues to sell its ephedra product.

On Wednesday, the General Accounting Office, an investigational arm of Congress, said a review of 14,684 complaints turned over by Metabolife to the Justice Department did not prove that Metabolife 356 caused the reported health problems – in part because Metabolife did a poor job of recording the complaints.

Among the records were 92 serious health complaints, including deaths, heart attacks and strokes, according to the GAO's report.