1321 Corralling Food Supplements

Food Chain Radio Podcast with Michael Olson

Gretchen DuBeau, Executive and Legal Director, Alliance for Natural Health

Do they not want our food to be our medicine?

Hippocrates is said to have said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food.”

In 1994, those who believed food should be medicine, and medicine should be food, gathered in Washington, DC, to fight back an effort by the pharmaceutical industry to register food supplements.

Their effort resulted in the Dietary Supplement and Education Act, or “DSHEA”, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

What DSHEA did, in essence, was to provide the legal foundation for what could be said about the function of food supplements that are being presented as medicine. One could only claim a function, like the cure of a disease, if that function was proved in a clinical trial, as is the case with prescription pharmaceuticals.

In setting up this legal framework, DSHEA split the world of medicine in two, with one medicine being pharmaceutical drugs and the other medicine being food supplements.

Today the worldwide pharmaceutical drug industry brings in $405 billion dollars a year, while the food supplement industry brings in an estimated $102 billion per year.

Given so much money, one would naturally expect a turf war or two to break out between the pharmaceutical and supplement industries.

One such turf battle took place in 2013, when Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois tried to pass legislation to register and restrict food supplements being sold as medicine. His legislation failed.

Then in 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation led an effort to establish international norms for nutrient dosage recommendations. Their effort failed.

Today, Senator Dick Durbin is back pushing legislation to register food supplements.

The efforts by Senator Durbin, Bill and Melinda Gates and the pharmaceutical industry leads us to ask:

Do they not want food to be our medicine?