Do you take dietary supplements? If yes, are you prepared to review what you are taking and ask yourself if you need to spend the money taking something that is not supported by any evidence?
In the US the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently announced measures to regulate dietary supplements.
The FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said: “It’s clear that the US Food and Drug Administration plays an important role in helping consumers make use of safe, high-quality dietary supplements while also protecting Americans from the potential dangers of products that don’t meet the agency’s standards for marketing. He continued: “I’m concerned that changes in the supplement market may have outpaced the evolution of our own policies and our capacity to manage emerging risks. To continue to fulfil our public health obligations we need to modernize and strengthen our overall approach to these products. Toward these goals, the FDA is committing to new priorities when it comes to our oversight of dietary supplements at the same time that we carefully evaluate what more we can do to meet the challenge of effectively overseeing the dietary supplement market while still preserving the balance struck by Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act.”
The FDA’s priorities will include (1) communicating better about safety issues related with dietary supplements and (2) establishing a regulatory framework to promote innovation, as well as upholding product safety and (3) creating new strategies of enforcement.
Earlier this month, the FDA posted 12 warning letters and five online advisory letters to US and international companies, which are illegally selling more than 58 products, primarily dietary supplements, as treatments for serious health conditions, when their safety and efficacy is unknown.
Gottlieb stated: “Science and evidence are the cornerstone of the FDA’s review process and are imperative to demonstrating medical benefit, especially when a product is marketed to treat serious and complex diseases like Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is a challenging disease that, unfortunately, has no cure. Any products making unproven drug claims could mislead consumers to believe that such therapies exist and keep them from accessing therapies that are known to help support the symptoms of the disease, or worse as some fraudulent treatments can cause serious or even fatal injuries. Simply put, health fraud scams prey on vulnerable populations, waste money and often delay proper medical care – and we will continue to take action to protect patients and caregivers from misleading unproven products.”
The advice above applies to people with MS. We have no evidence that pwMS need to take any supplements. If you eat a healthy balanced diet, for example the Mediterranean diet, you don’t need supplements. The only supplement I routinely recommend to my patients is vitamin D (vD). Why? There is no evidence that vD makes any difference to the outcome of your MS, but it has a role to play in bone health. We know that pwMS are more likely to have thin bones (osteopenia and osteoporosis) and are much more likely to suffer falls and fractures. Extrapolating data from the studies in elderly women we recommend pwMS keep themselves vD replete. We also know that the vast majority of our patients with MS are vD insufficient or deficient. Why? They don’t get enough sunlight exposure to manufacture their own vD in their skin or enough vD from their diets. Recommending vD supplementation is therefore not really evidence-based; we need to do trials to see if it helps prevent fractures in pwMS.
Please let us know what supplements you are using and who recommended them? We really need to debate this issue. Too many of my patients can’t afford to make ends meet; not wasting money on unproven supplements is one-way of saving money.
