New Durbin Bill Would Change DSHEA

From Natural Products INSIDER

A new bill from longtime DSHEA critic Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) would change the way supplements are regulated in very significant ways and add a lot of new burdens and costs to the industry. All supplement companies would be required to register every product with FDA, including ingredient lists and a copy of the label. There would also be required warning labels on certain ingredients as determined by FDA and the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Also, all products with "proprietary blends" would have to disclose the amount of each specific ingredient in the blend (so basically, no more proprietary blends). There is more, and it is not good. Needless to say, this is a bad bill for industry and consumers.

New Durbin Bill Goes After Supplements

From Natural Products INSIDER

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is again going after what he perceives to be weakly regulated dietary supplements by introducing a new bill this week that would require all supplements to be registered with FDA along with their labels and ingredients, require new cautions on labels, and require FDA to define what is a conventional food and what is a dietary supplement. The bill is called the Dietary Supplement Labeling Act.

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FDA New Dietary Ingredient Guidance Leaked

From The Benninger Blog

A copy of the FDA's much anticipated guidance on New Dietary Ingredients has made its way out of the agency and some of its contents are raising eyebrows. The agency had been given a deadline of 180 days after the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA) became law to release the document.


The first 307 pages of the 308 page document focus on interpreting the meaning of the word "new." The agency refers frequently to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary published in 1986, for example citing the second definition of "new" from page 796 of the reference book: "new: having been seen, known or used for a short time"

The agency then refers to the Webster definition of "time", specifically definition b: "a continuum which lacks spatial dimensions and in which events succeed one another from past through present to future."

After the 300+ pages of footnoted justification, the document concludes by stating that "based on the agency's determination that all ingredients have been seen, known or used for a short continuum lacking spatial dimensions, the agency concludes that by definition all ingredients are New Dietary Ingredients, and therefore 99.99999% of products currently on the market are adulterated."

April Fools.