Todd Harrison was quoted by The Rose Sheet on October 2, 2017, in an article about the dietary supplement industry. FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition hosted a discussion this week on developing a list of dietary ingredients that were available in the U.S. food supply before Congress passed the law establishing the current regulatory framework for the industry, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).
"A great idea on Oct. 15, 1994. Not a great idea 23 years later," said Harrison. "This is something that FDA should have done in the first instance. What FDA is basically saying is, look, 23 years have passed and we want to hit the reset button."
"Yet we've had all this innovation in between. You have all these ingredients that are on the market and nobody really knows whether they were on the market prior to [DSHEA] or not, and whether those documents exist or not," Harrison said.
"While typical vitamins and minerals are not questioned about being available pre-DSHEA, variations in some other dietary ingredients also widely considered traditional could prompt questions from FDA," he added.
Harrison also sees the Trump administration as more likely to facilitate changes that would simplify FDA's old/new ingredient burden. Although "the industry's scared to death of trying to tinker with DSHEA," legislation is needed to move the grandfather date for old ingredients to the day a bill would be passed and to require that FDA compile a list of all dietary ingredients eligible for use in supplements at that time, he said.