Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Author:Marion Nestle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520275966
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 23. Industry groups distributed this poster to health food stores during the 1993 campaign to overturn the FDA’s restrictions on health claims for dietary supplements. Posters like this encourged people to lobby Congress to protect their “constitutional rights” to take supplements.

Other supplement industry groups also warned their members that the FDA wanted to limit access to the products. An industry group called the Health Freedom Task Force produced a television commercial featuring a well-known actor displayed as arrested and handcuffed, presumably by FDA enforcers, for possessing a bottle of vitamin C.32 Although the FDA termed those images “absolutely false,” its ongoing activities were not reassuring. The FDA had just conducted a survey of claims made for supplements sold in health food stores in which investigators asked leading (and perhaps entrapping) questions like these of store personnel: “I am feeling kind of weak, do you have anything to help fight infection or help my immune system?” “Do you have anything that works on cancer?” Of 129 such requests, 120 had elicited recommendations for specific products. The report of this investigation also listed many agency enforcement actions against supplements for which people had reported adverse reactions. 33 From 1989 to 1992, the FDA had taken 290 actions against supplement makers, most of them just warning letters. Among the actions, 250 were for making unsubstantiated “drug” claims and the others for reasons of safety or improper labeling, leading the FDA Commissioner to conclude that “the marketplace is awash with unsubstantiated claims. . . . [W]e are literally back at the turn of the century when snake-oil salesmen made claims for their products that could not be substantiated.”34

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