This article is very long but worth reading imho.
A segment:
11/8/17
Vitamins and supplements are unregulated and potentially dangerous
businessinsider.com/supplements-vitamins-bad-or-good-health-2017-8
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" .....After spending the last few months of her pregnancy and the first few weeks of her new baby's life in isolation, Jamshidi's patient was able to go home and be with her family. Jamshidi said the experience changed the way he thought about supplements for good.
"I feel very negatively about them, and I didn't feel this way going into it," he said.
Ask Steven Tave, the director of the office of dietary supplement programs at the FDA, why the agency isn't stopping more similar situations, and he'll give a simple answer: "We're doing the best we can.".....
.......
Tave said that before [1994] DSHEA passed, the FDA was starting to regulate supplements more stringently, the way it does pharmaceutical drugs, but getting "pushback from the industry."
The law forced the agency to be more lenient.
Before a new drug can be sold, the company making it has to apply for FDA approval, and the agency has to conclude that the drug is safe and does what it claims to do.
"So if the drug says, you know, 'used to treat cancer,' then the agency's reviewers are going to look at it and make a determination that there's evidence that it does treat cancer," Tave said.
New supplements don't face any burden of proof.
The agency can review products that add new dietary ingredients when it gets a notification, Tave said, but it doesn't "have the authority to stop anything from going to market."
When DSHEA was passed, Tave said, the bill still made sense.
In 1994, about 600 supplement companies were producing about 4,000 products for a total revenue of about $4 billion.
But that market has since ballooned — today, close to 6,000 companies pump out about 75,000 products.
"We're regulating that with 26 people and a budget of $5 million," Tave said.
Removing a supplement from store shelves comes down to documented emergency-room visits and calls to poison-control centers.
Only when a supplement is reported to be unsafe as a result of one of these "adverse events," as the FDA calls them, is the agency compelled to act.
"Most of the time, we don't know a product is on the market until we see something bad about it from an adverse-event report. It's a very different regime from when we know everything is out there and we know what's in it," Tave said, adding: "We don't want to be reactive. We want to be proactive. But we can't be."
'Consumers have no way to know'
Most unsafe supplements have been found to contain ingredients that aren't listed on their labels — usually, these are pharmaceutical drugs, some of which have been banned by the FDA.
A study of product recalls published in 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that of the 274 supplements recalled by the FDA between 2009 and 2012, all contained banned drugs.
A 2014 report found that more than two-thirds of the supplements purchased six months after being recalled still contained banned drugs.
"The products we see today have gone way beyond that sort of core group that they were in 1994," Tave said. "Now they're promoted for all sorts of things — some are long term, some are short term, some are chemicals no one's ever seen before. It's a much different universe than it was at the time.".....
....Consumers have no way to know that what's in the label is what's actually in the bottle or box," Austin said...."
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