At the DSHEA Summit in Salt Lake City in June, hosted by NutraIngredients-USA in association with the United Natural Products Alliance, over 50% of delegates selected, “to be able to make stronger claims on their products if supported by competent and reliable scientific information” as their choice for improvements to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).
Loren Israelsen, UNPA’s president, sat down with NutraIngredients-USA at the recent SupplySide West to explore the topic of claims in more detail, noting that while this has been an ongoing conversation in industry circles for over a decade, “it’s ramped up over past three to years in particular,” he said.
“It’s become evident that the gap between the advances in science and knowledge and the framework of a structure function claim is increasingly stressed, that it’s a problem for several reasons. One, that structure-function claims largely are generic. How does a superior brand distinguish itself from others, if you wind up making the same general kind of claim?”
Israelsen said this is a “legitimate issue” and that, based on the audience polling at the DSHEA Summit, it is “high priority.”
“I strongly support the idea of a higher class of claims,” he said. “The tricky part is we still have to deal with this legislative framework, and then we ask the question, do we have to go in and modify DSHEA?”
‘Arbiters or truth’
Israelsen also discussed what he sees as “one of the greatest threats to the industry, and quite honestly, to society generally”: Efforts to stifle or suppress communications and information, particularly via social media where “a very small group of powerful companies somehow appointed themselves the arbiters of truth.”
He noted that the State of California tried to prohibit doctors from talking to patients during office offices about topics that deviate from the American Medical Association (AMA) standard of care or thought.
“If you think there’s misinformation, that requires more information, not silence,” he said. “And I will personally be working on this issue in concert with what do we do with structure-function claims.
“But we have to do it concurrently, because so much of how people learn is going to be through the electronic channels of free speech, and then some will say, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s commercial speech. You’re trying to sell a product.’ But what I see happening is simply discussing ideas that someone may disagree with about the value of a certain approach or a product or a concept.
“I mean, that is now being taken offline, and the number of people that have gone from being followed by millions, suddenly, one day, are gone. And that’s reminiscent of former times that I would prefer we not revisit.”
Watch the video above for the full interview.
