New Delhi, January 31, 2019: For more than 150 years, India’s food laws have made it criminal practice to “adulterate” food and pharmaceuticals in ways that might harm the consumer. Yet, thanks to the globalization of the food, pharmaceutical, and dietary supplement trades, those laws are often extremely difficult or even impossible to enforce. Rapid innovations in health and nutrition make controlling harmful or even toxic substances in dietary supplements a serious problem that threatens the health of every individual concerned with longevity, weight loss, and good dietary practice.
The Online Issue
The dietary supplement industry is expected to exceed $60 billion in cumulative worth by 2021 thanks to an entire generation of adults concerned with their health and comfortable with ordering products online. Thanks to easy access to both big-brand legitimate supplement products and a vast array of fake replicas containing substandard ingredients, public health is at serious risk. Because dietary supplements, specifically, are not regulated even to the extent that food and drugs are, and do not require a medical prescription, they represent a serious and largely unknown threat to the consumer.
Incorrect Use Renders Most Products Ineffective
Whether you are taking a dietary supplement to improve athletic performance, boost your immune system, or as part of what you perceive to be a daily, health-oriented lifestyle, many doctors warn that even good products are not particularly effective because most people use them incorrectly. For example, taking a daily multivitamin on a day when you met all your nutritional requirements with your actual food consumption could actually overload your body with one vitamin and block it from absorbing another.
The issue becomes even more problematic when the issue of expired products and fake products is factored in. For example, many B12 supplements are made with the amino acid taurine instead of B12. This makes them cheaper to produce, gives the consumer the “kick” of energy they expect from B12, and may have unexpected side effects like anxiety, rising blood pressure, or heart problems. The threat exists in the mislabeling, and at-risk consumers have no way of knowing they are taking something potentially problematic.
While regulatory measures are designed to force manufacturers to disclose the presence of taurine, in this example, in the B12 supplement, without testing it is difficult to enforce this type of labeling if the product is produced in an area of the world that does not subject manufacturers to this type of scrutiny. In this instance, testing in the countries where such a product is sold may be more effective than attempting to regulate the original producer on-site.
Protecting India’s Pharmaceutical Industry Integrity
With India emerging as a powerful player in the pharmaceutical research and development industry, it is more important than ever before that food law extends to careful evaluation and regulation of dietary supplements. An area of regulatory oversight that, by nature, lags, food law and its associated branches can hurt the industry if it fails to identify and eliminate threats to consumers in the form of falsely advertised supplements manufactured or sold on local platforms. Competition in the dietary industry is always fierce and promises to remain so with consumers around the world choosing increasingly extreme and exotic diets along with the associated supplements, shakes, and vitamin pills in order to live longer, lose weight, and follow the latest trends. Food law can help keep the many industries involved honest.
Corporate Comm India(CCI Newswire)
