The War on Supplements

From American Thinker.com (Sept. 8):

The Food and Drug Administration -- funded and controlled by Big Pharma -- is heavily biased in favor of drugs. And since Big Pharma wants to solidify its monopoly over medicine, it has coerced the FDA to campaign to limit consumer access to non-patentable nutritional supplements, which promote health and prevent disease. Drugs, even when taken properly under prescription, cause 1.9 million hospitalizations per year and close to 900,000 patients to experience serious drug reactions, according to a Harvard report. More alarming statistics: prescription drugs are a major health risk, ranking fourth (with stroke) as a leading cause of death; and new FDA-approved prescription drugs have a one-in-five chance of causing adverse reactions. But despite that, the FDA believes that it is supplements that are unsafe, and unleashes campaigns against them on behalf of Big Pharma.

Dietary supplements have never been considered drugs, and for long have been regulated as special foods. As intrinsic substances in the food supply, vitamins and supplements have been known for more than a century. The postulation that they are essential dietary factors, necessary to prevent disease, originated in research from as early as 1913. Vitamin C, for instance, prevents scurvy, and Vitamin D prevents rickets. So vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and other such substances were isolated and synthesized to guard against deficiency diseases and a variety of conditions.

But for at least the past decade, the supplement industry has been under siege by the FDA. Under the guise of protecting consumer health, several laws and regulations have been proposed to recharacterize them as drugs and thus give the FDA the power to regulate them. For decades, the FDA has subjected the industry to economic harassment in order to restrict consumer access to supplements. The agency has sought to achieve this through regulations and -- more importantly -- restrictions on claims that can be made for supplements. Therefore, although supplements, unlike drugs, do not kill people in the thousands annually, the FDA seeks expensive trials. Since the revenues of supplement manufacturers are way below those of Big Pharma, such demands jeopardize their products. As supplements are viewed as competition for drugs, such checks would prove a boon to the drug industry and benefit the FDA as well.

In the early 1990s, the FDA was moving toward a policy of restricting the availability of dietary supplements. It even stated that supplements represented a “disincentive for patented drug research.” In 1994, in response to requests from the whole-foods industry and health-freedom advocates, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) to protect consumer access to a wide variety of safe and beneficial supplements. [read more]

Nothing good can come from gov’t and business alliances especially when one is influencing the other.