According to a recent study, many of the medicine ingredients that people consider to be inactive may, in fact, cause health problems for some consumers.
Are the inactive ingredients in pills truly inactive?
Alongside the active components in medicines, there is almost always a list of other ingredients.
Manufacturers add these inactive components for a number of reasons. For instance, they might make the drug more easy to absorb or stabilize the compound.
Or, they could simply enhance the way the product looks or tastes.
For the majority of people, additives such as fructose and lactose will do no harm whatsoever, but for certain people, they could cause issues.
Recently, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA, decided to investigate these additives.
They wanted to understand whether these ingredients might be affecting people's health.