From a prominent dietary supplement company to an advocacy group for the pharmacy profession and coalition fighting obesity, various stakeholders of the Dietary Supplement Quality Collaborative support and push for an FDA proposal for a mandatory product listing. Christine Burdick-Bell is among the senior executives in the natural products industry in favor of requiring dietary supplements be listed with FDA. The requirement she and many others envision would enable the FDA and others, from consumers to physician to identify in one database the tens of thousands of dietary supplement products on the market.
While FDA estimates as many as 80,000 dietary supplement products or more are sold in the U.S., the agency has limited visibility into all of them because they are not subject to either pre-market approval, registration or a listing requirement. “The FDA doesn’t really have a way to know what’s out there [in the market], and it’s hard to regulate that which you can’t see,” said Burdick-Bell Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary oh Pharmavite, which owns brands Nature Made and MegaFood. Burdick-Bell also chairs the Dietary Supplement Quality Collaborative (DSQC), a diverse group of stakeholders representing the supplement sector, medical community, consumer groups and other interests.
Burdick-Bell envisioned a provision in the law that would render a dietary supplement product “adulterated” if it was not listed with FDA. “If we simply said, ‘Look, you’re adulterated if you’re not on the list,’ that’s a big incentive for everybody to get on that list and for the FDA to be able to see what’s in the market,” Burdick-Bell explained in an interview in 2020, when she was serving as vice chair of the DSQC. “Mandatory listing as “just common sense” that would help to distinguish “legitimate” from “fraudulent” products.
During an interview in October, Joseph Nadglowski president and CEO of the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC), said he would like a product listing to require disclosure of such details as the name of the product, its ingredients, an image of the label and contact information. Burdick-Bell said a copy of the label should be shared with FDA—and crucial information on the label would be searchable in the FDA database, like the product’s name, Supplement Facts panel and required allergen disclosures.
A product compliance database like HawkScanner goes hand in hand with the suggested push for mandatory product listing. With our tiered plans save your inventory of product and HawkScanner constantly checks them against the official FDA compliance database. Be alerted if a product is flagged or if anything’s changed since you last checked.