[mwbajor]

There is too much contradictory evidence from the medical community on the efficacy of vitamin supplements. However, enough circumstantial evidence exists to prove two things: 1) Diet studies are hard 2) Pharmaceuticals are not going to fund a study for a cheap supplement 3) If this is true then the FDA should fund a "good, big diet/supplement study" but they dont. For this, I would say the FDA can't be trusted with "doing a good job" when a possible cheap solution exists.

[neltnerb]

I completely agree about the incentives for supplement studies.

However, the FDA, critically, has totally different and vastly less difficult regulations for supplements as opposed to drugs. Where by drugs I mean things the manufacturer wants to sell as a treatment for a specific condition, for which they were required to provide evidence.

I totally agree that the funding incentives are not good for studying cheap supplements. I have no idea why you think that has anything to do with the FDA, just buy the supplements if you think the circumstantial evidence is good enough.

Edit: For instance, I have been trying R-Lipoic Acid lately. No one stopped me. No one advertised it as a treatment. I found some research papers that said it might help and my doctor said it wouldn't hurt. I don't think it helped, but certainly the FDA didn't get in the way.

[mwbajor]

" I have no idea why you think that has anything to do with the FDA, just buy the supplements if you think the circumstantial evidence is good enough."

Can the FDA turn the circumstantial evidence into real evidence? I think they can.

[neltnerb]

I've never heard of the FDA funding a drug study, that is more a NIH thing. If the FDA were sending out requests for proposals I would expect them to be about:

- testing food for contamination

- inspecting food facilities and farms for safety

- ensuring drugs are not contaminated and that safety reports are coordinated

The NIH is the one that provides funding for health studies... please understand that I'm not saying it's good or correct that studies of supplements aren't getting funding, I'm saying that the FDA is not involved. Direct frustration at the right target, pharmaceutical companies (i.e. capitalism) having no interest in unpatentable low cost treatments and NIH/government not funding such studies when they should.

I agree, the NIH should study all these things -- and does if you look at their budget, via tens of thousands of individual academic research groups with less incentive to not study supplements. Capitalism is still there, but if anywhere can study it without worrying as much about profit motive it'd be academia or a national lab.

I also agree that NIH should have more money targeted at low-profit drug studies. That's unfortunately the kind of thing that gets determined by congress unless they decide to do it on their own.

The best situation is one where the legislature requires a minimum amount be spent by an agency to support certain kinds of research (for instance, they do this across the federal government through the SBIR program for small businesses).

https://www.nih.gov/ABOUT-NIH/WHAT-WE-DO/BUDGET

> The NIH invests most of its $45 billion budget in medical research for the American people.

> Over 84 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.

> In addition, over 10 percent of the NIH's budget supports projects conducted by nearly 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories, most of which are on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The remaining 6 percent covers research support, administrative, and facility construction, maintenance, or operational costs.