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Many supplement companies hide behind the catch words of "natural" or "herbal" to convince customers into believing that their products are safe. But what many people don't know is that the nutritional supplement industry is actually unregulated by the FDA or any other governing body, meaning that companies can release whatever they want under the guise of it being a "nutritional supplement" and not have to worry about anyone verifying the product's purity, safety, or efficacy. Last fall, the general of the Department of Health and Human Services issued a disturbing report that dramatically reinforces the need for oversight in the marketing and sale of dietary supplements. There has been a massive increase in dietary supplement sales and use in recent years, a veritable boom with 14.8 billion dollars being spent on non-vitamin, non-mineral dietary supplements in 2007 alone. Out of that 14.8 billion, at least 4 billion of that was herbal supplements alone. Results from a National Health and Nutrition survey found that roughly half of all American adults use a dietary supplement with 1/5th of those using a supplement with herbal ingredients. The common misconception is that because herbs are natural and being sold legally, that they must be safe and that they work. And most people actually believe that the supplement IS regulated. In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act or DSHEA, which due to strong lobbying efforts from the nutritional supplement industry, allowed exemption of dietary supplements from the same strict regulations as the food industry. Between 1994 and 2008, there was a dramatic increase in "adverse events" caused by nutritional supplements, and in the first ten months of 2008, the FDA took in nearly 600 reports of serious, possibly fatal reports of adverse events due to supplement ingestion. What is worse, is that the FDA believes that the reporting of these "adverse events" is drastically lower than the reality of what is actually happening. Another huge problem is that even when the FDA knows that a supplement is dangerous, such as ephedra, which took more than 10 years to ban, it has no authority to mandate the product's removal from the marketplace without very high, strict legal requirements demonstrating the product's dangers. A new supplement company, Whole Body Research, has recently been getting praise for their strict standards and third-party testing, which they hope to become a new standard of quality in the supplement industry. The company is one of the few to actually back all of their claims with scientific and medical studies and places an strong emphasis on purity, quality, and safety. For more information about Whole Body Research, visit their website, Whole Body Research.
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whole body research, supplements, nutrition, health, dieting,
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