Magic Bullets or Modern Snake Oil? #3

Reasons for the Confusion

The vast majority of American consumers, as much as 80% of the population, feel that they do not consume adequate levels of vitamins and minerals in their diets. National nutrition surveys tend to support this perception, with USDA statistics indicating that less than 1% of U.S. adults regularly consume 5 or more servings of fruits and vegetables daily and more than 70% of the population fails to achieve even RDA levels for many vitamins and minerals. National and regional surveys clearly indicate that millions of American consumers are using dietary supplements on a regular basis. When queried regarding their reasons for selecting a particular supplement, however, responses tend gravitate towards the more general benefits such as, “for more energy,” or “as nutritional insurance” rather than for specific health concerns.

Over the past 3 decades, there has been an explosion in the amount of scientific evidence linking nutrition and health. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of nutrition information, and the conflicting health messages that are generated in response to each new study, serves only to compound the confusion faced by consumers. In 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act (DSHEA) established a framework for the U.S. regulation of dietary supplements. Depending on your perspective, DSHEA is either “good” because it enables the delivery of information to consumers that enables them to make their own decisions about supplements, or it is “bad” because it permits manufacturers and marketers to make unsubstantiated claims for particular ingredients based on their “structure” or “function” in the body (e.g. glucosamine for joints or amino acids for muscle building). The reality of the situation, is that DSHEA is neither “good” nor “bad” and consumers need to have at least a superficial understanding of the law in order to fully appreciate and evaluate the claims made for various supplements. For example, the types of “structure/function” claims permitted by DSHEA require little to no actual research – and a good biochemistry text is the only “tool” needed for generating many claims.

Finally, the popular press has perpetuated a common public misconception; that the dietary supplement industry is “unregulated.” The truth of the matter is that although the FDA does not expressly approve the introduction of specific supplements, there are numerous regulations in place that require FDA notification of new products, require product claims to be “clear and not misleading” and require companies to have adequate evidence of safety and efficacy for all products and ingredients. The “trick” of course, is that FDA has neither the resources nor the public mandate to aggressively police the claims language used to promote the hundreds of thousands of supplement products that are on the market.

Continued Tomorrow

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