Health Food Industry Soars to $3 Billion

These figures, culled from the Council on Responsible Nutrition, include estimates of up to $3.1 billion in 1989, with some 50 companies dominating the industry.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), already overwhelmed by internal problems and scandals, is unable to do much monitoring of the soaring health food business.

Cox News Service quoted FDA Spokesman Chris Lecos: “The FDA has never been able to effectively regulate the dietary supplement industry.”

He said that in the early 1970s the FDA had set out to “design a regulatory process” for vitamin, mineral and other food supplements but that Congress had amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1976 to prohibit such pre-regulation.

What he did not say was that the incipient health-freedoms movement of that era effectively lobbied legislators to block a power grab by FDA which would have brought all supplements under the control of the federal agency, which many health-freedoms advocates see as little more than a “Gestapo” for the drug companies which both control American medicine and reap enormous profits from selling synthetic compounds, largely derived from the petrochemical industry.

Cox also quoted Dr. Paul Thomas, a research scientist at the National Academy of Science: “The deregulation philosophies of the current and previous administration have had much to do with this growth (in the health food industry).”

Thomas said people largely take supplements because they believe they are not getting adequate nutrition in readily available food and also because they have suspicions that food processing, chemical fertilizers and the like may be reducing nutritional values or actually contaminating foods.

But fears ranging from cancer and heart disease to acne and sexual impotency have probably fueled most of the rush to try supplements, industry spokesmen say.

The massive increase in chronic degenerative disease and a proliferation of new, seemingly incurable disorders which did not exist a century ago have caused many people to opt for prevention over treatment and to believe, based on gathering evidence, that nutrition helps prevent disease.

Vol 9 Issue 3 Page 3