A powerful, pro-food safety lobby group, known as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is pushing hard to eliminate the structure/function and qualified health claims regimes that many Americans see as being central to informed consumer choice in the natural health sector.
The organisation has fingered some of the biggest food industry players for making what it says are false or misleading health-related claims on food packages. In CSPI's sights are none other than Kelloggs and Nestlé. But it is the hundreds of much smaller companies that will feel the pinch if CSPI gets its way. To help its cause, it's laid a 158-page report detailing examples of what it considers to be false or misleading claims at the door of the USA's Food & Drug Administration (FDA), which considers itself responsible for regulating around $1 trillion worth of food and drug products.
Health claims regimes in the USA
The US health food industry has for many years enjoyed one of the least restrictive claims environments in the world. This regulatory environment hasn't come by accident. It's been hard won. The passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994 gave unique status to dietary supplements, allowing their marketing to include the use of health claims that provide the consumer with information about the benefits of particular products. But it took close to a revolution to bring this about. More people sent letters to Congress than on any other issue in US history, expressing their concerns that drug laws would be used to regulate and ultimately eliminate natural health products. Such a situation would undoubtedly result in the loss of many thousands of products from the market given the prohibitive costs of a drugs regime for most small to medium sized companies that had until this time been the real pioneers in the natural health sector. In fact, it would have decimated the industry as we know it, leaving only a sprinkling of very large corporations as players in the market.
