Dietary Supplement Essay

Cindy Le

Professor Shen

English 301

29 October 2015

Dietary Supplements

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official website, a dietary supplement is a product intended for ingestion to add further nutritional value or “supplement” the diet. Dietary supplements can come in many forms such as tablets, capsules, soft gels, gel caps, liquids, or powders. What makes it a dietary supplement is the dietary ingredient it contains. The FDA states that a "dietary ingredient" contains one or more of the following: vitamin, mineral, herb or other botanical, an amino acid (U.S. Food and Drug Administration). Dietary supplements are an alternative that can help ensure that you get an adequate dietary intake of essential nutrients.

The Food and Drug Administration is not required to check on the safety of dietary supplements before they are sold on the market. Before the supplements goes into question or any inspection it has to wait until it receives a report caused by the supplement. Joanna Sax claims in her article, Dietary Supplements are Not all Safe and Not all Food: How the Low Cost of Dietary Supplements Preys on the Consumer, that dietary supplements sold down the aisle from FDA approved over-the-counter (OTC) drugs or nonprescription drugs, are not tested for safety or efficacy prior to market entry (377). Dietary supplements are treated as food within the FDA policies, therefore the regulations for approval are questioned. The author of Dietary Supplements: A Review of United States Regulation with Emphasis on the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 and Subsequent Activity, claims, “Congress and the Food and Drug Administration or FDA struggled to define such boundaries until they finally created an intermediate product group called dietary supplements”(Scarbrough, 2004). The intermediate product group, Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 or DSHEA was established mainly for the regulation of dietary supplements and it has a new set of standards that is different from the FDA. The DSHEA attempted to create a balance between foods claiming that they have some health benefits and drugs that have clearly approved health