Every time I return home, They will bring back some dietary supplements with them. Without him, Nutrients in the United States are cheap, The quality is relatively reliable, and most relatives and friends in China also believe them very much. However, if you want to ask me how credible the effects advertised in these nutrients are, I can only ha ha. Because I can only say that according to American law, these propaganda is not fake. The advertisement of nutrients is either fake or true? Nor is it. They are not fake, which does not mean that they are all the truth. They are likely to be only part of the truth, or a little truth. Is this what what means? Something you can eat in your mouth, When it is sold as a commodity in the United States, It is supervised by two government departments. One is called the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). One is called the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These two departments, The direction of nature management is different. The concerns of the Trade Commission, It is anti-monopoly, anti-fraud, Consumer protection, To promote commercial competition. The concern of the Medicine and Food Administration, It is food and medicine safety and public health. For example, If the merchant clearly knows that the function advertised by a health product is inconsistent with the actual function, That is, merchants deliberately cheat, This is what the Trade Commission is in charge of. What I said about the promotion of nutritional supplements in the United States is not false. This is the meaning. However, For the FDA, This is not enough. For example, the benefits of merchant publicity, It may be the most beneficial research result from many studies. In the view of the Trade Commission, Businessmen did not deliberately fake it, So there’s no problem. But, the FDA would think, Businessmen are choosing evidence that is beneficial to their marketing. To exaggerate the utility of their products, Is misleading consumers. Yes, Of concern to the FDA, It is the promotion of this product, Whether it is based on rigorous scientific evidence, Compared with the Trade Commission, Obviously, it is much stricter. FTC checks the credibility of commodity publicity, while FDA checks the credibility of commodity publicity. The current situation of the US nutritional supplement market is that FDA has taken a back seat and FTC is mainly in charge. Therefore, it is not fake, but it is not true enough. Why did this happen in the historical origin of the complicated situation? This is actually the result of a series of laws introduced in the 1990s. For businesses, What they certainly hope is that, Use lower standards to supervise. Because the supervision is too strict, There will be too much extra cost, It greatly restricts the development of the industry. For example, drugs, It is a product that is strictly regulated by FDA. Since the 1980s, The cost of drug research and development in the United States is increasing year by year, Up to now, the average cost of developing a successful drug has exceeded 2 billion US dollars. The main growth, In large-scale clinical experiments. Let the manufacturers of nutritional supplements do such clinical experiments to determine the effect of their products. For an industry whose total sales per se were only tens of billions in the early 1990s, It is obviously impossible to achieve. However, Nutritional supplements are not drugs, But nutrition. This means that, Nutrition is a complex subject, Because nutrients form a huge and complicated network, Mutual influence, To determine what a nutrient does, It’s not easy at all. So if you want to collect evidence of the effect of nutrients through clinical experiments, What is needed is a larger-scale experiment than clinical drugs. Higher costs, The result is more uncertain. This also means that, Nutrition may not be good, But it may not have any negative effect, Or to a large extent, Its role is vague, It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad. That is to say, It can produce much less negative effects than fake drugs. For businesses that produce nutritional supplements, They felt that, own products, Not so much close to medicine, It is more like food. Since consumers have the right to choose whether to eat apples or bananas, One or two a day, Then natural consumers also have the right to decide to take what vitamins. Obviously, American consumers also think so. As early as the 1930s, In American pharmacies, Vitamins account for a third of all sales. Of course, Compared with food, Producers of nutritional supplements also face a problem, That is, food does not need publicity, Consumers also know that they need to buy. And nutritional supplements, if they don’t do publicity, I’m afraid no one will buy them specially. Therefore, the subtle status of nutritional supplements lies in that they want to be sold as food while emphasizing their health effects. Some people may say, wrong ah, food marketing is not also using health to talk about things? That’s right. Breaking the balance of power between the two sides, It was in 1984, Kellogg, a famous food company, introduced wheat bran cereal. All-Bran, The advertisement impressively reads: [The National Cancer Institute believes that, High-fiber and low-fat foods may reduce your risk of certain cancers. This health statement, Kellogg asked experts from the Cancer Institute to review it. As soon as this advertisement comes out, Kellogg’s cereal sales have increased by half in six months. Cancer Research Institute is also a sister unit of FDA. They are all under the Ministry of Health, The FDA was angry and helpless. So, After this battle, Whether it’s a food company or a nutrition company, They began to write health statements on their products for marketing. By 1989, Among the new food products, Four Chengdu has a health statement for promotion. This year, There was also the first large-scale accident caused by taking nutrients: 1,500 people developed disabilities due to long-term use of tryptophan, Thirty-seven people died, More than 60,000 people eventually got sick, The FDA finally banned the product. At this time, The United States Congress finally introduced the first relevant law, The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. This law requires all listed foods to be labeled with nutritional ingredients. At that time, Only 30% of foods in the United States have nutritional labels. And in exchange, The FDA needs to allow food and nutrition companies to use health statements, However, the health statement to be used must be approved by FDA. At this time, FDA is based on the principle that [industry experts] must reach [significant scientific consensus] through [reasonably designed research], It was agreed that folic acid, for example, could [reduce the risk of neural tube defects in infants], A sign that calcium can [reduce the risk of osteoporosis]. For nutrient companies, This is not enough, Because there are too few consensus conclusions that can be reached in nutrition research. They support further deregulation. To trust the common sense of the people, Have the ability to identify relevant information. Their polls show that [Two-thirds of Americans don’t think the FDA manages vitamins, minerals and herbs as drugs just because they want to make a true health statement]. Finally, In 1994, The United States Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, Manufacturers themselves do not need to prove the safety of their products, This responsibility is transferred to FDA. Manufacturers only need to provide some evidence that the nutrients are effective. You can apply for your own health statement. As a compromise, The FDA does not allow any words of diagnosis, prevention or treatment to be written in the health statement. And for those health statements that are not approved by FDA, To add [this statement has not been reviewed by FDA], And awaiting FDA review. After this series of victories, Food and nutritional companies have gained great freedom to publicize the health effects of their products. Now, the focus is on what kind of evidence manufacturers need to submit. FDA insists on the need for [significant scientific consensus], It is difficult to overthrow at present. However, it may become more accurate with further research. This is in the view of manufacturers. It was still too strict. So by 1997, Congress passed the FDA Modernization Act, It is required that for food, Health statements only need to be issued by U.S. Government agencies or the National Academy of Sciences. An authoritative research conclusion that has not been overturned supports, It can be passed. The nutrition industry will immediately follow up on this conclusion. The [significant scientific consensus] was challenged in the 1999 Supreme Court case Pearson vs Shalala. The Supreme Court, in the name of protecting freedom of speech, I chose to stand on the side of the nutrition industry, It is believed that only sufficient additional notes need to be added after the statement of health. People will have enough discernment, Can judge its real utility. At this point, The FDA has completely lost the war. Nutrition companies can put their best health statements on their products. To do this, They only need to find one or two of the most supportive studies from a large number of related studies. While selectively ignoring other research that is ineffective (usually the vast majority) or even unfavorable. In order to avoid liability, All they need to do is put a small asterisk next to the health statement. Then mark it in small characters in an inconspicuous place of the product: [This statement has not been reviewed by FDA. This product cannot diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.] The nutrition market in the United States, From 10 billion at that time, it skyrocketed to more than 30 billion US dollars. So of course, I can only hehe about such statements: the reason why they can obtain such freedom is precisely because they have no what effect and, of course, no what harm. The more mysterious the products are, the more useless they will naturally be in what. Believe them, and you will lose.
