The Publisher’s Desk: Winning the Battle, Not the War

There was a big sigh of relief on the health freedom front last month. Senator Dick Durbin, who introduced S.1310, otherwise known as The Dietary Supplement Labeling Act, pulled a stealth move when he began to suspect his bill isn’t going to pass. Durbin’s bad bill attempts to restrict your access to safe, affordable nutritional supplements by giving the FDA major new powers to make arbitrary standards and rules.

As I’ve mentioned in past columns, the act, if passed, gives the FDA and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) the power to decide the safe levels and combinations of nutritional supplement ingredients. Supplements would be controlled by an agency (the FDA) biased against nutritional supplements and an agency (the IOM) that ignored science to issue a pathetically low daily recommended vitamin D intake that will subject a large number of people to vitamin D deficiency. The bill would allow the two agencies to create lists of “bad” ingredients or “bad” doses based on completely arbitrary or non-existent standards.

With opposition to the bill pouring in, Durbin changed tactics. He proposed an amendment to a budget bill, in the hopes the amendment wouldn’t draw too much attention and therefore pass along with the budget bill. The amendment would have the Government Accountability Office (GAO) assess various aspects of the FDA. Hidden in the amendment are some of the same provisions that are also in Durbin’s Dietary Supplement Labeling Act, including a clear delineation to be made between food and supplements—a first step toward treating supplements as drugs.

Thanks to the efforts of Senator Harkin and Senator Hatch, the Senate passed that spending bill without the Durbin amendment. After this victory, it’s still important to contact your senators and ask them to oppose S.1310.

The Durbin bill is just one example of the uninformed prejudice that exists against dietary supplements on many fronts. For example, the media reported upon a flawed study that claimed multivitamins increase death. I invite you to read the rebuttal to that study in this month’s newsletter.