[smooth_remmy]

> Dietary supplements are more or less unregulated, as long as they don't claim to diagnose or treat a disease. This is not exactly a great situation for consumers.

If dietary supplements were regulated, they would probably 1) cost 10x as much 2) be prescription-only 3) only be affordable through health insurance 4) there would be 1/10th the innovation compared to what we see now.

I'm a consumer who consumes a basic set of supplements (vitamin d, vitamin k2, magnesium, multivitamin) and I'm very happy with how things are now.

I'm glad that the extreme level of waste, red tape, and corruption that affects the rest of the medical industry does not affect dietary supplements.

[ebg13]

> I'm a consumer who consumes a basic set of supplements (vitamin d, vitamin k2, magnesium, multivitamin) and I'm very happy with how things are now.

Fundamentally, no you aren't. What you are is a consumer who thinks they consume a basic set of supplements naively without oversight. Without a regulatory body verifying the safety and efficacy of the products, you actually have no idea that they contain what they claim and that they aren't tainted by e.g. lead or arsenic.

[smooth_remmy]

There are regulatory bodies overseeing generic prescription drugs and those still have quality control problems: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/12/7222165...

[ebg13]

> There are regulatory bodies overseeing generic prescription drugs

This is also sadly wrong. There are regulatory bodies overseeing only a very tiny fraction of generic prescription drug production (ask how often they inspect and test batches) because of a systemic drive to dismantle and defund regulatory oversight exactly as championed by the person I was replying to.

Oversight in the face of rampant fraud requires testing continuously, not once every few years, not sometimes after something goes wrong, and it requires funding to hire overseers.