Please check your facts. The FDA does oversee dietary supplement labeling and always has, the FTC does not and never has. The FTC regulates advertising, and for all products, not just supplements. Your statement above is simply false. DSHEA is not the cause of most of the issues with dietary supplements. In fact, the cause is the unwillingness of the FDA to implement and enforce DSHEA. The agency has behaved like a scolded child ever since this law was passed. And it was not passed because of some powerful lobbying effort as the anti-supplement coalition claims. DSHEA was passed because the FDA was unfairly and arbitrarily declaring supplements to be unapproved food additives and unapproved drugs. In one case, FDA tried to stop the sale of black currant oil capsules by claiming that the capsule was the food, and therefore the oil inside was the food additive. Since the agency had not pre-approved black currant oil as a food additive, it was therefore adulterated. FDA lost the case, appealed, lost again with the judge calling their argument "alice in wonderland," and sought to appeal to the Supreme Court but the Solicitor General would not take the case. This demonstrates exactly how overzealous FDA was as it attempted to place every nutritional substance under the regulatory structure of either food additives or drugs. DSHEA was the result of this and other outrageous FDA acts and viewpoints. Following its passage, FDA took more than 12 years to institute the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) specified by the law, the agency still has not addressed the New Dietary Ingredient pre-approval provision in any meaningful way, and rather than take enforcement action against companies selling misbranded or adulterated products, the agency has preferred to issue press releases and shrug its shoulders. To argue that DSHEA is the cause of today's issues with dietary supplements is, at best, uninformed. I've been covering this industry and this issue for many years, and I am happy to discuss it with you anytime. And if you would like to speak to the attorney who opposed FDA in the Traco Labs black currant oil case, please let me know. His firm is also the one that won the case in the 1960s when FDA tried to ban retail stores that sold vitamins from also selling books about vitamins. And in the 1970s when FDA sought to declare any vitamins that had more than tiny amounts of nutrients to be drugs (Congress was forced to act to put FDA back in check then too, passing the Proxmire Act). It has been a long story, and it is far from over. Thank you for your consideration,
Jon Benninger
Director of Business Development
Virgo Publishing
Phoenix, Arizona

Hello Don,
Thank you for the response. I still think it is incorrect to say that DSHEA limits FDA's power to ensure honest advertising. FDA has never been charged with regulating advertising, before or after DSHEA. That has always been the responsibility of the FTC, whether the ads for supplements, foods, tires, funeral services, shoes or anything else. On the other point, I would love to know how the situation with supplements would be different if FDA had actually implemented and enforced DSHEA. The responsible members of the supplement industry welcome FDA enforcement, and in fact, have lobbied for more funding for the agency, lobbied in favor of mandatory reporting of serious adverse events, and are hopeful that FDA will conduct inspections of many manufacturing facilities so that the bad actors are removed from the market. We had FDA's Brad Williams speak at one of our recent trades shows, and he encouraged industry to point out to the agency any companies that are not complying with the law. The real companies are happy to do this, as long as the agency responds. Anyway, I think we share a lot of common ground, other than the idea that FDA should be given more authority. I think the agency is broken (and not just in the supplement area), and that is where attention should be focused. After so many failures related to drug recalls, food contaminations, counterfeit drugs, etc., it is time to think about major changes to the agency, not to the laws.
Jon