The Good Story About Supplements and Food Safety
Supplements & Food Safety
According to Daniel Fabricant, PhD, executive director and CEO of the Natural Products Association (NPA), regarding food safety, “dietary supplements have been doing a great job,” he said. “ Packaged food is not the problem traditionally. Most outbreaks are from raw ingredients and foods sold in stores and prepared foods in restaurants. To really understand how our supplement industry is doing over time, we can monitor FDA inspection reports, but that is limited to some degree because they are not random samples.”
Fabricant noted that in terms of consumer confidence of foods, much of FDA’s time has been spent doing dietary supplement inspections. “In terms of labeling reviews, it used to be that FDA spent 85 percent of its resources devoted to conventional food labeling and 15 percent on dietary supplements. That flipped in 2010 with the emergence of dietary supplement inspections. Today FDA spends 85 percent of its labeling expertise and resources on dietary supplements and only 15 percent on conventional foods. That should bolster consumer confidence, but it is a story that no one knows. We all need to do a better job of telling that story.”
Adverse events