If a health product works, it’s cheap, and it isn’t made by a pharmaceutical company, it will come under attack by the mainstream scientific institutions, authorities, and the media. Scientific American’s latest attack is in a long line of hit-pieces against dietary supplements that, if taken seriously and implemented, would result in the supplement industry being wiped out. Action Alert!
The editorial in Scientific American (SA) not only calls for implementing Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) supplement hit list that we successfully defeated last year; not only does it urge the FDA to regulate supplements more like drugs; it calls for supplements to be regulated more than drugs by requiring third-party testing for safety and efficacy. All this for a group of products that are safer than conventional foods, as shown by our sister organization, the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH-Intl) using European data. Supporting these absurd recommendations are the same old, weak arguments that have been used to attack supplements for years; they were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. We have to push back against these baseless viewpoints, lest they be used by Congress to support passing Sen. Durbin’s anti-supplement policy in this Congress.
The FDA already has the power it needs to stop fraudulent products, or products spiked with illegal ingredients, from the market. In the past, we should remember that FDA leadership deliberately refused to enforce laws in the hope that something would occur which was so bad that the public would call for a drug-like regulatory scheme for supplements.
Like many of the other anti-supplement hit pieces we’ve rebutted in the past, the SA editorial starts by asserting that supplements are unregulated: “Right now no federal agency fully oversees the clinical testing and chemical verification of nutraceuticals in the U.S., and these products are often plagued by quality and safety problems.” In fact, current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs) for supplements could not be more stringent.
Laws to guarantee safe products are already on the books, and it is up to the FDA to enforce those laws. If once in a great while some bad actors fail to meet current high standards, and the FDA fails to hold them accountable, this should not reflect on the entire industry. Every industry has its share of bad actors – and the supplement industry has actually had very few by comparison with others, especially when compared with the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry (see here and here).
The editorial moves on to cite a popular statistic drawn from a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 2015: “A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 23,000 emergency department visits and more than 2,000 hospitalizations every year are attributed to adverse effects of dietary supplements.”
Let’s remind ourselves this was an estimate. An estimate that actually came from just 3667 cases found in 63 hospitals participating in the CDC’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System–Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance (NEISS-CADES) project between 2004 and 2013. In that sense it’s not real data, on real people.
When this statistic was released in 2015, we also noted that over 20% of the cases analyzed were the result of unsupervised children swallowing pills, while 40% of cases among those 65 and older were caused by choking. Many other cases were heart palpitations from ingesting too many diet pills, sexual enhancement pills, and energy drinks. But why let the facts get in the way of propaganda?