The dietary supplement industry has enjoyed record profits from their endless lists of new products aimed at treating or preventing a host of illness or conditions. While disease prevention and healthy living should be important to all Americans, however, these products are not backed up by sound research, medical or otherwise, and have no oversight by the government. As a result, dangerous products, as well as those that have no proven effect, can be sold as “real” cures or treatments. In some cases, these products cause far more damage than the initial condition and are simply too dangerous to be on the market. Between the rampant false advertising, lack of verified research for support of claims, effectiveness, and most importantly, safety, it is irresponsible of the government to allow the dietary supplement industry to continue without regulation.
As the article by Michael Spector entitled, “Miracle in a Bottle” points out, there is an ever-increasing demand for herbal and other dietary supplements to treat or prevent a range of conditions such as obesity, for example despite the fact that the FDA does not have the regulation some think over the dietary supplement industry. While Spector’s article devotes a significant amount of its focus on the popular diet pill Zantrex-3, he uses this commercially successful product to discuss the range of dangerous issues involved in the wholesale consumption of other similar products that have no real oversight by the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In general, Spector’s conclusion is that this entire dietary supplement industry is built around the false promotion of goods that are not proven to be effective or safe and that this deception is not only wrong in a moral sense, but is medically dangerous. More importantly, as expressed in the article “Miracle in a Bottle” the fact that these diet supplements are being marketed by the dietary supplement industry as having valid scientific claims backing them is just dangerous rather than the result of mere misleading advertising.
The only solution to the problems such as those expressed by Michael Spector in the article “Miracle Bottle” directed at the dietary supplement industry is complete oversight and regulation by the FDA. Over the course of the past several decades as genuine scientific, medical, and other research has offered a great deal of data concerning the way food as well as certain herbs can have a significant impact on health. Since that time, there have been thousands of products from the dietary supplement industry that aim to consolidate these healthy benefits into pill, drink, or other form so that the average American can become “healthier.” Unfortunately, after 1994, the year Congress decided to release the dietary supplement industry from federal regulation, an explosion of new herbal and supplemental products hit the shelves, all of them unregulated and thus able to make wildly exaggerated and often quite unsupported claims.
As Michael Spector states in his landmark article on the dietary supplement industry entitled, “Miracle in a Bottle” regarding the FDA, “Since that legislation, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act became law and companies have been able to say nearly anything they want about the potential health benefits of what they sell. As long as they don’t blatantly claim to have a cure for specific disease…they can assert—without providing evidence” (Spector 2005). In other words, while there may have been some initial validity to the claims that certain substances found in food and herbs could prevent or treat certain conditions, the dietary and supplemental industries have taken advantage of this change in thinking about food and herbs and have created a billion dollar industry.
