The new regulations are extensive covering over 800 pages...

Ukmedix News welcomes the initiative shown by the Food and Drug Administration of America to regulate the diet and weight loss supplement industry in the country. Supplements are a huge business in America worth many billions of dollars but many of them are ineffective and some of them are even dangerous.  Just because they do not contain banned substances they are permitted to be sold over the counter at shops and supermarkets.

The regulations have taken ten years to finally be released and formalised and we should see much better practices and much safer supplements now coming on to the market. One only need to think of the famous Anna Nicole Smith to realise how dangerous some of these weight loss supplements can be. The other problem is that overweight and obese people are given false hopes about the effectiveness of the supplements which actually do not do anything at all.

The new regulations are extensive covering over 800 pages and thus all weight loss supplement manufacturers will have a lot of reading to do now. All ingredients in weight loss supplements will now have to be tested according to a code of practice before they are allowed to be released and the rules will affect all companies no matter what their size.

The regulations stipulated that smaller companies that had less than twenty employees will have to adhere to the regulations within three years and larger companies that have over 500 employees must clean up their act within the year. The astonishing thing is that in America about 70 percent of all people take some type of dietary supplement and the huge amounts of money to be made from them means that some manufacturers are less than scrupulous about the way they make them.

America which has a vast and problematic obesity situation needs a good set of regulations to help the weight loss industry come up with effective and safe supplements and this should set the way forward.