Adam Note: Thanks to the TraceGains team for covering this article. Having worked in the dietary supplements industry myself, it’s a very competitive field and it’s easy to have things slip through the cracks. Intentionally or by accident. There can be serious repercussions for not doing your research when creating supplements but TraceGains can help with making sure you are doing the right thing.
Dietary supplements have never been more popular – worth as much as $194 billion by some estimates. According to a report from the Center for Responsible Nutrition, more than three-quarters of American adults – or about 170 million people – take dietary supplements regularly.
But as with anything that generates a lot of buzz – and money – regulators are increasingly interested in the supplement business. Oddly enough, nearly half of Americans – 48 percent – already think the Food and Drug Administration tests the supplements they find on store shelves. When, in reality, because of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 – or DSHEA as it’s better known – supplements don’t have to pass FDA muster before they’re sold to consumers.
Either way, American consumers overwhelmingly support tougher regulation of dietary supplements. A recent Pew Charitable Trusts survey found that 79 percent of respondents “strongly” support a requirement that dietary supplements makers provide the FDA a list of their products and ingredients.
“These findings illustrate the urgent need to improve the FDA’s ability to ensure the safety of supplements. Only Congress can authorize mandatory product listing. Lawmakers should pass legislation soon that gives the agency crucial information to act quickly and effectively when public health risks arise,” writes Liz Richardson, Project Director, Health Care Products for Pew Charitable Trusts.
It’s a sentiment echoed by then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb back in February when he wrote, “Making healthy choices about diets can have a significant and positive impact on Americans’ health. To be able to make those choices with respect to dietary supplements, consumers need to have access to safe, well-manufactured, and appropriately labeled products.”
Today, consumers can choose from more than 80,000 different supplements – a far cry from the 4,000 different products that were on store shelves when DSHEA became law 25 years ago last month. And consumers are generally confident in the safety of dietary supplements – much more than other categories of supplements – with 85 percent of survey respondents viewing them as “extremely” or “pretty” safe. Dietary supplements are also the most widely used type.
“Still, one in 20 said that they or an immediate family member had experienced serious side effects from such a supplement,” according to the Pew research.
Devising new dietary supplement products is difficult enough already. But smart manufacturers will want to stay ahead of any new regulatory scrutiny, which is almost certainly on its way. Especially in light of the sudden popularity of historically troubled ingredients such as CBD.
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Researching ingredients to back up label claims has always been a labor-intensive and slow process for supplement manufactures that’s involved everything from reviewing catalogs, searching the internet for information, to working the phones and calling suppliers for samples.
Until now.
With Smart Alerts, supplement manufacturers can streamline and consolidate these tasks to ease claims substantiation and ensure regulatory compliance. Smart Alerts offers a comprehensive taxonomy that integrates hundreds of data sources to deliver precise sourcing quickly. Manufacturers can research by commodity, country of origin, type of threat, supplier, date of event, and more.
Staying up to date is easy with automatic alerts for key ingredients and formulas, and daily system updates on new and emerging issues. Integrated with other TraceGains solutions, companies can continuously monitor and manage supply chain risk all in a single system.