What do the elections mean for dietary supplements?

If you like being able to buy your dietary supplements, or if you are at all concerned about the safety of the food that makes its way to your table, you should know that elections ... and your vote ... do have consequences.

At a recent conference on ingredients for dietary supplements, I heard a lot of concern about the impact this election might have on these things. Knowing who to vote for, though, is a bit tricky. From the perspective of natural products, it’s not just a Republican vs Democrat thing. Based on past experience, certain Senators and Congressmen are generally understood to be “friends” or “enemies” of the natural-products world.

Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Dick Durbin, both of whom were reelected, earned the “enemy” title when they cosponsored a bill way back in 2003 that would have required dietary-supplement companies to spend billions to test their products the same way big pharmaceutical companies do. Of course there are not nearly enough profits in the supplement industry to do this, so it would have effectively removed all your supplements, even things like vitamin C from the store shelves.

And if you were paying attention earlier this year, you saw Sen. John McCain introduce the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010, which would have done something similar. This was based on the publicity surrounding NFL players being found to have been doping with steroids and trying to pin the blame on adulterated dietary supplements, when the amounts of the banned substances in their systems were so high that they would have had to have been taking hundred of pills a day. However, when there is an opportunity for a politician to associate himself with anything that is brings him publicity, you can bet he’ll do it.

Fortunately, there were people like the powerful ... and reelected ... Sen. Orrin Hatch (a “friend”) to steer him away from this disastrous course. Such a bill would have deprived us all of natural products for health and killed an important industry. If he were to go, who would champion your vitamins? There were other shenanigans, as well.

Another person labeled an “enemy” is Henry Waxman, who snuck an amendment into the Consumer Protection Act of 2009 that would expand the powers of the Federal Trade Commission to write its own laws targeting dietary supplement companies. No Congressional oversight, just write and enforce the law in the FTC’s own courts. Insidious. Even now the FTC routinely targets supplement companies that are simply pointing people to scientific studies on the Web about the ingredient they are using in their supplements. Although Waxman remains in Congress, he will lose the chairmanship of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, and this could remove one threat the natural-products industry faced.

Food safety fears
One worry I heard expressed was "what will happen if a bunch of the Tea Party candidates get into office?" The general consensus is that, because they want to defund anything to do with government (“government is our enemy”), there is likely to be major defunding of food-safety oversight, something that is finally getting some overdue love from the Obama administration. Given the problems and recalls we’ve had in just this last year, de facto deregulation like underfunding would be a very bad direction for food safety in this nation.

"With additional authority unlikely to be granted by the new Congress," said Natural Products Association Executive Director and CEO John Gay, "NPA expects federal regulators to test the limits of their existing powers. We support their actions aimed at getting the bad actors out of the market,” said Gay, “but it is a problem if they target the legitimate industry, especially if they go beyond the current law to do so.”