New Survey Misses the Mark on Supplement Regulation—Here’s Why That’s Dangerous

A new survey is being used to justify overhauling supplement regulations—but behind the misleading data and fear-mongering lies a real threat to your access to safe, effective natural health products. Action Alert!

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THE TOPLINE

• The survey claims public support for “modernizing” supplement regulation, but its centerpiece—Mandatory Product Listing (MPL)—is a Trojan horse for overregulation that could restrict access and inflate costs.
• Misleading narratives and flawed studies, like recent claims linking common botanicals to liver damage, are fueling public confusion and support for unnecessary new rules.
• While some reforms are worthwhile—such as allowing companies to cite peer-reviewed research—the FDA already has the power to enforce safety; the real issue is its selective enforcement and pharma-driven agenda.

A new survey from the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) claims that Americans “overwhelmingly support modernizing supplement regulations.” This campaign represents a dangerous step toward turning supplements into a drug-like commodity, making access harder, more expensive, and in many cases, impossible.

ANH supports honest reform that empowers consumers and upholds safety without undermining access. We welcome some of the other changes discussed in the survey’s findings, like allowing companies to share peer-reviewed science about nutrient benefits (in fact, we’re working on major legal initiatives aimed at doing just that) and closing regulatory loopholes that allow drug companies to monopolize natural substances. These are reforms we’ve supported and worked towards for many years. But proposals like mandatory product listing (MPL) are a red flag—a duplicative, unnecessary policy that paves the way for European-style restrictions that would decimate supplement availability in the US.

The Real Problem Isn’t Supplements—It’s the Narrative

Despite overwhelming evidence showing supplements produced by established dietary supplement companies are safe, well-regulated, and widely used by Americans for health maintenance, we continue to see misleading headlines and biased studies that paint them as a public health threat. A recent example—a JAMA Network Open study claiming botanicals were causing liver injury, played all the familiar supplement-bashing notes: because supplements aren’t FDA-approved, we don’t know if they’re safe and/or effective; they’re sold via “unregulated retail outlets”; there are “frequent discrepancies between product labels and detected ingredients”; and US Health Department data show supplements cause 23,000 emergency room visits a year!

The study in question focused on just six botanicals—turmeric, green tea, Garcinia cambogia, black cohosh, red yeast rice, and ashwagandha—and made sweeping insinuations about hepatotoxicity. But in their own “Limitations” section, the authors admit their survey wasn’t designed to detect actual liver damage or establish any causal link.

But there is another layer of complexity that has been emerging: unscrupulous operators selling unlicensed drugs like tianeptine—often referred to as “gas station heroin”— some of them masquerading as dietary supplements, through gas stations, vape stores, headshops, convenience stores, and online retailers. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary recently issued his own warning about these fraudulent products; yet one has to wonder why FDA enforcement has not been more effective in preventing the sale of these dangerous and often addictive substances.

In short: the headlines say one thing; the data, especially as it relates to responsible dietary supplement companies, says another. With misleading narratives about supplement safety, and conflating responsible operators with unscrupulous ones, it’s no wonder that a general survey that was not designed to expose these nuances shows Americans support more regulations.

Context-Free Fear-Mongering

Let’s revisit the often-cited claim that supplements cause 23,000 ER visits annually. That figure—drawn from a limited sample of hospital reports over a decade ago—translates to just 0.0115% of users, based on current estimates that over 200 million Americans use supplements regularly. And many of these ER visits? They were due to choking, unsupervised child ingestion, or overuse of energy products—not supplement safety or quality.

Compare this with the 1.9 million hospitalizations each year from properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, or tens of thousands of deaths, and the narrative begins to collapse. In fact, dietary supplements are among the safest consumer products available—statistically safer than food, and far safer than drugs.

So why the push to regulate them like drugs?

Mandatory Product Listing: Trojan Horse for Overregulation and Red Herring for Unscrupulous Operators

While the survey claims 75% of voters support modernized regulations, this support is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. In our view, this isn’t a mandate for new laws—it’s a reflection of media-driven confusion and years of pharma-funded misinformation.

We agree action is needed. That action should take the form of going after unscrupulous operators selling unlicensed drugs and adulterated dietary supplements. Introducing Mandatory Product Listing would have no effect on these operators—they already ignore the abundance of regulations in the Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act as it is. Enforcement of existing regulations—not the promulgation of new regulations—is what is required.   

Mandatory Product Listing—a central pillar of Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) ongoing anti-supplement campaign—would force all supplement manufacturers to pre-register their products with the FDA before selling them. While pitched as a transparency measure, ANH-USA sees it as a prelude to banning ingredients, creating bureaucratic chokepoints, and opening the door for arbitrary enforcement and de facto pre-approval schemes. Note that regulatory provisions are already in place in Europe to see full-scale bans on high-dose vitamins, melatonin, ashwagandha, berberine, aloe, and alpha lipoic acid. With ever more joined up work between regulators around the world, such precedents in Europe have a significant influence on bureaucrats in the FDA.

Let’s not let pharma-driven, anti-supplement campaigns that have drastically reduced the diversity of the supplement market in Europe wreak havoc on this side of the Atlantic. The US remains the global bastion of innovation for natural products which has allowed the integrative medicine community to practice effectively often without any recourse to conventional pharmaceuticals that remain one of the leading causes of death in the US. Drug overdoses (mainly from opioids) are estimated by the CDC to cause over 100,000 American deaths annually, and drug adverse reactions are estimated to rank between the 4^th and 6^th biggest killers in US society (see here and here).

Reform That Serves Consumers—Not Corporations

There are reform proposals we agree with:

• Fixing the drug preclusion clause so natural ingredients can’t be pulled from the market just because a pharmaceutical company files an Investigational New Drug (IND) application—as in the case of NAC and NMN.
• Allowing companies to cite published, peer-reviewed studies about nutrient benefits—something shockingly still off-limits under current law.
• Ensuring enforcement against bad actors that spike products with illegal ingredients, especially in gas stations, vape stores, convenience stores, and e-commerce settings.

But these changes don’t require a full overhaul of DSHEA. The FDA already has the authority it needs to go after fraud and dangerous products. The problem is not a lack of power—it’s the willful refusal to use it. As supplement company NOW Foods found when it submitted extensive independent lab data exposing fraudulent supplements online, the FDA chose to ignore the evidence.

Why? Because it fits a narrative. The worse the supplement marketplace appears, the stronger the justification for overhauling DSHEA and putting the FDA in charge of a pre-market approval system—which would be a death knell for the supplement industry as we know it.

Supplements are not unregulated. They are not dangerous. And they are not a public health threat. They are a cornerstone of modern self-care for millions of Americans—empowering people to take proactive steps toward wellness, often where mainstream medicine fails.

The danger isn’t supplements. It’s letting flawed narratives, false data, and industry interests drive policy.

Action Alert!