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On average, there are 23,000 people who visit an emergency room each year because they had a bad reaction to a dietary supplement.
Just imagine: You take a dietary supplement that claims it could improve your memory, energy levels, sleep, weight loss, digestion, or a host of other issues. But instead, that same “miracle cure” could lead you straight to the hospital.
So why does this keep happening? The answer is frustratingly clear: The FDA does not currently review or approve dietary supplements before they are sold to consumers.
Due to a law passed in 1994, dietary supplements are classified as food, so they aren’t regulated in the same way as prescription drugs. But unfortunately, dietary supplements do sometimes contain hidden, banned, or untested drugs — like stimulants — that could seriously harm your health. Plus, supplements can be contaminated with harmful substances due to poor factory conditions.
This is a serious problem: Two-thirds of Americans now take a supplement, providing the industry with a whopping $60 billion a year. We need to make sure that these customers aren’t spending their hard-earned money on pills that have unintended side effects or don’t work any better than a placebo.
With supplements increasing in popularity, we urgently need to regulate these products, but it’s not going to be easy to defeat industry opposition. That’s why we need you to sign our petition: Will you add your name to protect consumers fr