Vitimans - Part 1
Vitamins: What is the Deal?
Marketplace madness and what you need to know….
Vitamins, it seems like everyone is taking them (at least most of us are!) and everyone’s selling them.
You and I are told by the media, our healthcare system (legitimate factions and not so legitimate one’s) and seemingly every well-meaning random stranger on the street that if only we were taking (FILL IN THE BLANK HERE) we’d be cured, be skinner, have more hair, tighter skin….etc. It is inescapable in the U.S. from TV advertisements to our local gyms – someone has the answer in a bottle.
So why does there seem to be such a plethora of options? And how actually is our government regulating what goes into these pills we are seemingly so happy to take?
Right now, you might be thinking from reading the introduction above, that I’m against vitamins and supplements – quite the opposite – most American consumers can benefit from specific vitamin supplementation. Human metabolic processes, hormone – like regulation and various other bodily processes could not happen without the presence of vitamins. LCHADD patients are no different. Especially those fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K. But that is for another blog post at some point in the future…(hint, hint!).
This post focuses the basics and background of the U.S. government regulations and lack-thereof, when it comes to the vitamin marketplace.
The basics: The U.S. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 DSHEA – established regulatory framework for dietary supplements (and vitamins) (Bailey, R. L. 2018). Thus making it so the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) could consider these supplements as food. By declaring dietary supplements as food, the government could now provide an outline of specific qualifications as well as standardization in protocols across the entire Dietary Supplement industry. This provided some much needed ‘have to’s’ for this segment of the marketplace.
First, with the passage of DSHEA companies now had standards of what they can legally say is a supplement (legal definition), labeling - what can and needs to be on the label of a supplement, (daily value, active ingredients, warnings, etc.), and processes for adverse event reporting (so a supplement can be monitored for public consumer knowledge) (Bailey, R. L. 2018).
Second, the FDA passed the ‘Good Manufacturing Practices’ – which means processes used in preparation, packaging, labeling, storage of supplements as well as the ingredients used are all following a standardized documented process to ensure purity, composition, and strength of the given vitamin or supplement in question.
The Problem: Efficacy (the ability to produce the desired or intended result) as stated by the DSHEA was not written out in detail for supplement manufacturing practices. Meaning besides following the basic guidelines manufactures had no other legal obligation to follow strict protocol for supplement production and distribution - this included vitamins. Henceforth, efficacy is not required under U.S. Law (Bailey, R.L. 2018).
Phewwww……you got to the end of this post! Stay tuned for more vital vitamin information and my vitamin selection tool kit.
Cited Sources:
Bailey, R. L. (2018, November 13). Current regulatory guidelines and resources to support research of ... www.doi.org. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1524364
While this publication is 5 years old the actual facts surrounding the passage and subsequent acts of DSHEA have not changed according to my best current research practices.
