A new bill could see food and supplements removed from the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) jurisdiction.
The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) is ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the bill but says ‘there are concerns’.
The bill proposes that all of the FDA’s safety authorities – to include dietary supplements – be transferred to a newly-created Food Safety Administration. The FDA would be renamed the Federal Drug Administration.
“This would be a very positive move,” states the ANH, “as we’ve long argued that the FDA has a massive conflict of interest in regulating drugs and supplements, which are competitors, while FDA receives substantial funding from the drug industry. With some important caveats, we should support this important bill.”
Moving supplements out from under the FDA’s thumb would be a huge step in advancing their wider use throughout American healthcare
The ANH, which has ‘long advocated for an independent agency to regulate supplements, separate from both food and drugs’, now believes that placing supplements under the jurisdiction of the new food safety agency would be ‘a much better option than keeping them under the FDA’s jurisdiction’. “At the FDA they are seen as competition for drugs, and it is drugs that pay the FDA’s bills. In other words, FDA supervision of supplements involves a massive conflict of interest.
“This isn’t the first time this bill has been introduced. In fact, Senator Durbin and Representative DeLauro have been introducing versions of this bill for the last several years. Previous versions of the bill also took food safety responsibilities from the USDA and placed them under the new Food Safety Administration. None of these previous iterations of the bill picked up any steam in Congress.
“For these reasons, we are cautiously optimistic about this bill. We have to be on the lookout for changes to the language that undermine supplement access but moving supplements out from under the FDA’s thumb would be a huge step in advancing their wider use throughout American healthcare and society,” says the ANH.
