Supplements make everyone a beta tester

Once coding is done you have an alpha test, with friends and family checking the code. Then comes the beta test, where volunteers are allowed in. Finally comes what I call the "gamma test," or the general market release.

For most of what we put into our bodies the process is pretty similar. Beta testing is the way we roll.

Few companies push cures through the full FDA approval process. If you'll settle for sales, not just prescriptions, you call what you offer a supplement and bypass the government entirely.

Few object to that. My health food store might not have gotten through the 1980s without that kind of forebearance. But in the last decade all kinds of quack cures have used the supplement exception to make us all beta testers.

I have written before about one such substance, revasterol. Following its mention on Oprah by Dr. Oz Mehmet of RealAge, the doc's face has been all over the Net pushing an anti-aging elixir made of