FDA Plans more Supplement Scrutiny

By Christopher Walker
Jan 2 2011

The Food and Drug Administration announced today that they will spend 2011 looking closer at the dietary supplements that are sold on the US market.

According to the announcement, the FDA has discovered several supplements sold on the open market contain banned drug substances and other ingredients that are not listed on the label for the products.

At this time the FDA does not have regulations in place for natural supplements on the market. As such the supplements can be sold on the internet and through retail locations without prescriptions. However, they do regulate the ingredients that are contained within the supplements.

According to federal law, natural supplements may only contain herbs and vitamins and cannot contain any substance that has been deemed a drug by the FDA. But over the last several months supplements have been found to contain drugs that reside on the controlled substances list.

A new law was passed through Congress in December that stipulates that the FDA can enforce the laws regarding natural supplements in the same way that they enforce ingredients in prescription medications.

Under the current law, the FDA can bring criminal charges against those companies that knowingly add banned substances to their natural supplements that are sold in the US.

However, the problem that the FDA has at this point is the fact that most of the substances that are sold in the US are created in China and then distributed to the US through a series of suppliers and secondary retailers, making it nearly impossible to enforce the new laws.