As we all know, the FDA cannot require that dietary supplements be proven effective before they are sold. Yet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once said the FDA is exhibiting an “aggressive suppression” of vitamins, dietary supplements, and other substances and that he will end the federal agency’s “war on public health”.
With Kennedy now in the driver’s seat, the supplement industry expects to make bolder health claims for its products and to get the government, private insurers, and flexible spending accounts to pay for supplements, essentially putting them on an equal footing with FDA-approved pharmaceuticals.
The day Kennedy was sworn in as secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump issued a “Make America Healthy Again” agenda instructing health regulatory agencies to “ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.” Kennedy added that dietary supplements are one key to good health. Supplement makers now want programs like health savings accounts, Medicare, and even benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to pay for vitamins, fish oil, protein powders, herbal remedies and probiotics.
In speeches and in a pamphlet called “The MAHA Mandate,” Emord and alliance founder Robert Verkerk said Kennedy would free companies to make greater claims for their products’ alleged benefits. Emord said his group was preparing to sue the FDA to prevent it from restricting non-pharmaceutical products.
With their ‘Mandate’ Emord and Verkerk want “to shift the healthcare paradigm towards one that restores the health of the American people through a holistic and individual-centered approach that works with, rather than against, nature”.
But do they ever question whether:
- vitamins do anything at all to people who eat a normal diet?
- fish oil is effective and safe for which conditions?
- protein powders have any effects beyond eating a steak?
- herbal remedies generate more good than harm?
- probiotics work for which conditions?
The short answer is no. To me, it seems that the MAHA are as uninterested in the evidence regarding efficacy and safety (quite possible they know how flimsy it is) as they are keen on the promotion of quackery.
4 Responses to With RFK Jr. in charge, the US dietary supplement industry is about to cash in
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I don’t usually present (or follow) YouTube links, but I think this one is important enough to merit attention. In his speech, US Senator Chris Murphy shows the unprecedented corruption that is now one of the pillars of power for the Trusk government, explicitly addressing how this corruption harms real healthcare and benefits snake oil salesmen:
https://youtu.be/hycoCYenXls?t=1154
The rest of this speech is also worth watching, and frankly very, very disturbing.
Some of us CAMee conspiracy theorists see this as all back to front with the main corruption being in current healthcare. RFK taking on the all powerfull corporate healthcare system will hopefully eventually reveal what factors are causing the ever increasing rates of disease that so concern the public.
You conspiracy theorists should be pleased about this. After all it might be that some supplements are playing a factor in this?
We need to know and not in 30 years time either.
The earth is a disk, the sun revolves around the earth and Trump is a stable genius. Dream on.
@JK
I’ll be the last to claim that US healthcare is top notch as it is right now – it is among the worst of all western countries, yet also the most expensive system by far. And more people than anywhere else in the world go bankrupt because of medical bills.
The root cause(!) of this is not so much corruption among doctors, but a failure of politics to regulate public healthcare in a fair and sensible way – and this again is caused by a rather misplaced belief in ‘freedom’, where people can’t be forced to pay for health insurance, and especially pharmaceuticals and insurance are left to market forces. Which is not good, because healthcare is not like a normal market at all: people do not want to get sick and buy a doctor’s services, nor can they plan medical expenditure like you can plan buying e.g. a car. As a result, pharmaceutical companies can basically charge whatever they want. One example is the price of an epipen. In most western countries, an epipen costs about 40 dollars. Not the US: there, this simple yet life-saving device can cost up to 600 dollars – a price that especially people with lower incomes simply can’t afford.
There are several major errors in what you say here:
– We already KNOW the causes of most chronic diseases and health problems in the US. The single most important one is obesity, which is the cause of dozens of lingering health problems, from diabetes to (auto)immune diseases to depression to musculoskeletal problems and many, many more.
– If you want to study public health issues, then the last thing you should do is to put someone in charge who not only is completely clueless about medical science, but actively spreads nonsense and lies about it. RFK Jr. has a track record of being completely wrong about these things; e.g. his ‘World Mercury Project’ was predicated on the ardent belief(!) that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines caused autism. Which was very, very dumb, because most western countries never used this mercury compound, yet showed an autism prevalence similar to the US. And sure enough, when this mercury compound was banned from American vaccines as well in 2001, nothing at all happened to autism prevalence. Kennedy never admitted to being wrong, but renamed his antivaxx operation to ‘Children’s Health Defense’ – still a misnomer, because to the best of my knowledge, they have not made even one child healthier. Quite the contrary, I’d say.
– And last but not least: if you want to find out what is wrong with public health, arbitrarily demolishing federal agencies involved with public health and the research (and funding!) thereof is not the way to go. Or, in a car analogy: if your car doesn’t run smooth and guzzles gas, then the way to go about it is NOT to take a sledgehammer and start smashing things.
As already said, current developments will only serve to make US healthcare even worse, harming more people than ever before, while increasing corruption, quackery and general ignorance. So Trump and his billionaire cronies may be ‘winning’, but countless millions of Americans will lose out in terms of money and health.
Still, RFK Jr. appears to be marginally less stupid than Trump and his other clowns, given that he actually recommended vaccination to help curb the Texas measles outbreak. Then again, he also promoted mostly useless treatments such as vitamin A and fish oil supplements. So I’m not very optimistic.