This is according to the most recent data. But the FDA’s tightening of supplement regulations is for our safety, right? Action Alert!
Every year, the American Association of Poison Control Center’s National Poison Data System (NPDS) releases an annual report that tracks deaths and serious adverse events as a result of poisoning from a wide variety of substances, including drugs and supplements. NPDS is “the only comprehensive, near real-time, poisoning surveillance database in the United States.”
According to the most recent report, ZERO Americans died from taking any supplement in 2013. That includes anything from substances that must be taken with care and medical guidance, such as kava kava or yohimbe, or ayurvedic medicines (which must be sourced with care to be sure they are free of heavy metals), to standard vitamins and amino acids, to the gentlest homeopathic remedies. Of course, to most of us in the natural health world this is unsurprising. Dietary supplements have an exemplary track record of safety. In fact, our partners at ANH International calculated that, according to the European Union’s own data, we are more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than die from taking a supplement.
Properly prescribed (FDA-approved) prescription drugs, on the other hand, cause an estimated 1.9 million hospitalizations or hospital treatments and 128,000 deaths each year. And this is very incomplete data because it only concerns hospitals.
Despite these impressive safety numbers for supplements, the FDA, public health officials, certain academics, and some public officials continue to rail against supplements as unsafe and unregulated, using “consumer safety” as a smokescreen. If they were really concerned about the public, why not make drugs safer?
Nowhere is this more apparent than the recent New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) guidance. Here, the FDA has taken a law Congress passed and has twisted it into what is in essence a pre-market approval process for supplements. Not only would pre-approval be required, this new scheme would also be used to remove thousands of supplements from stores and deliver entire sectors of the supplement market into the hands of the pharmaceutical industry, tied up with a pretty little bow.
And all of it done on the pretense of protecting consumers. Supplement safety data exposes this for the sham that it is—these agency moves have nothing to do with consumer safety and everything to do with fattening the coffers of Big Pharma. We must not let it happen.
Action Alert! If you haven’t already, send a message to the FDA regarding theie new NDI guidance. Please take action immediately.
Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:
New Drug-Resistant Killer
Mercury Found in High Fructose Corn Syrup
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Here we go again!! Another one of the Government’s alphabet agencies (the FDA) sticking its nose into a business WHERE IT DOES NOT BELONG!! We cannot allow this agency to classify naturally occuring supplements as pharmaceutical drugs!!!!
Had to put phone number in to send the supplements comment. But I do not want any phone calls. How to prevent calls?
….and there are still government-dependent toadies out there who crave the controlling hand of the state and its tyrannical bureaucracies – to take care of them from cradle to grave. Our loss of freedom and individual sovereignty is not important to them – it’s the fact that they seem to be taken care of – the cost of which is born by others – is what’s important to them!
Our government wants us dependant on prescriptions. We are easier to manipulate and control if they and their corporate cronies can dole out what is vital to us. Why else would so many man-made toxins banned in most other countries still be legal for common use here? This includes many pharmaceuticals. Our government is really, really, corrupt!
I am making room to grow more herbs that I may not have access to otherwise in the future. I will try to grow enough to have plenty of excess, especially those that help with pain control. I believe that there will be a new pharmaceutical pain killer coming out once the access to existing narcotics, including kratom, is cut off.
Thankfully nature is full of plants with medicinal properties. It isn’t up to bureaucrats to prevent having access to what we need to be healthy!
I’m on your side and I’m an advocate, but I completely disagree that no one died from a supplement in one year. Maybe the deaths were covered up, however. And in the other article, I don’t understand how you can say that two-thirds died from the fungi disease. That would mean most of us would know a few people who died from it.
That’s a lot of maybes Krissy.
The article reflects facts, not assumptions and presumptions.
Trying to send but your spam controller won’t let me. It rejects every entry into the image copier I put. It’s broken!