Latest news with #PureFoodandDrugAct
The Advertiser
7 days ago
- Health
- The Advertiser
Ask Fuzzy: What were Dr Williams' Pink Pills?
In 1899, what could best be described as an advertorial appeared in The Geelong Advertiser. The claims it made were astonishing and, if only half of them were true, everybody should be taking Dr William's Pink Pills For Pale People. The list of ailments for which it promised "certain cure" was apparently limitless: indigestion, pimples, skin diseases, liver and kidney troubles, biliousness, anaemia, sleeplessness, rheumatism, lumbago, loss of physical strength, neuralgia... Women should be especially keen because it included "all female irregularities", whatever that meant. If that wasn't enough, it was said to cure "debility" and "sick headaches", but they kept the best till last: "loss of vital forces". Indeed, one wonders why billions of dollars on medical research since then has been necessary since the Pink Pills would doubtlessly also cure COVID and AIDS. Dr Williams, of course, was just one in a long tradition of snake oil companies harvesting money from gullible people. The quack cure originated in Canada in the late 1800s and was marketed in numerous countries around the world, including Australia. In an early example of using influencers, advertisers enlisted prominent people to endorse their product. One (probably fictitious) Dr Guiseppi Lapponi - "Physician to the Vatican" - proclaimed that he had used Dr Williams' Pink Pills in his practice "with good results". Oddly enough, the pills might actually be helpful for "pale people" with anaemia. A 1909 examination by the British Medical Association found, along with liquorice and sugar, they contained iron supplements. Unfortunately, a third of the iron in the pink sugar-coated pills had oxidised. The pills, they noted, had been "very carelessly prepared". MORE ASK FUZZY: Pill contents varied over time, and some variants included aloe laxatives. There were, however, concerns and, to control fake medicines, Theodore Roosevelt passed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration. That forced vendors to list active ingredients' purity levels on labels. While that may have had some effect, shelves today are lined with products that tap into nutrition anxiety. Concoctions promise "anti-aging" and "fusion health". They will even "fuel your cells"! In a curious coda to this story, George Fulford of G. T. Fulford & Company, who marketed the pills, died in a car accident in 1905, making him the first Canadian on record to die by automobile accident. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: In 1899, what could best be described as an advertorial appeared in The Geelong Advertiser. The claims it made were astonishing and, if only half of them were true, everybody should be taking Dr William's Pink Pills For Pale People. The list of ailments for which it promised "certain cure" was apparently limitless: indigestion, pimples, skin diseases, liver and kidney troubles, biliousness, anaemia, sleeplessness, rheumatism, lumbago, loss of physical strength, neuralgia... Women should be especially keen because it included "all female irregularities", whatever that meant. If that wasn't enough, it was said to cure "debility" and "sick headaches", but they kept the best till last: "loss of vital forces". Indeed, one wonders why billions of dollars on medical research since then has been necessary since the Pink Pills would doubtlessly also cure COVID and AIDS. Dr Williams, of course, was just one in a long tradition of snake oil companies harvesting money from gullible people. The quack cure originated in Canada in the late 1800s and was marketed in numerous countries around the world, including Australia. In an early example of using influencers, advertisers enlisted prominent people to endorse their product. One (probably fictitious) Dr Guiseppi Lapponi - "Physician to the Vatican" - proclaimed that he had used Dr Williams' Pink Pills in his practice "with good results". Oddly enough, the pills might actually be helpful for "pale people" with anaemia. A 1909 examination by the British Medical Association found, along with liquorice and sugar, they contained iron supplements. Unfortunately, a third of the iron in the pink sugar-coated pills had oxidised. The pills, they noted, had been "very carelessly prepared". MORE ASK FUZZY: Pill contents varied over time, and some variants included aloe laxatives. There were, however, concerns and, to control fake medicines, Theodore Roosevelt passed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration. That forced vendors to list active ingredients' purity levels on labels. While that may have had some effect, shelves today are lined with products that tap into nutrition anxiety. Concoctions promise "anti-aging" and "fusion health". They will even "fuel your cells"! In a curious coda to this story, George Fulford of G. T. Fulford & Company, who marketed the pills, died in a car accident in 1905, making him the first Canadian on record to die by automobile accident. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: In 1899, what could best be described as an advertorial appeared in The Geelong Advertiser. The claims it made were astonishing and, if only half of them were true, everybody should be taking Dr William's Pink Pills For Pale People. The list of ailments for which it promised "certain cure" was apparently limitless: indigestion, pimples, skin diseases, liver and kidney troubles, biliousness, anaemia, sleeplessness, rheumatism, lumbago, loss of physical strength, neuralgia... Women should be especially keen because it included "all female irregularities", whatever that meant. If that wasn't enough, it was said to cure "debility" and "sick headaches", but they kept the best till last: "loss of vital forces". Indeed, one wonders why billions of dollars on medical research since then has been necessary since the Pink Pills would doubtlessly also cure COVID and AIDS. Dr Williams, of course, was just one in a long tradition of snake oil companies harvesting money from gullible people. The quack cure originated in Canada in the late 1800s and was marketed in numerous countries around the world, including Australia. In an early example of using influencers, advertisers enlisted prominent people to endorse their product. One (probably fictitious) Dr Guiseppi Lapponi - "Physician to the Vatican" - proclaimed that he had used Dr Williams' Pink Pills in his practice "with good results". Oddly enough, the pills might actually be helpful for "pale people" with anaemia. A 1909 examination by the British Medical Association found, along with liquorice and sugar, they contained iron supplements. Unfortunately, a third of the iron in the pink sugar-coated pills had oxidised. The pills, they noted, had been "very carelessly prepared". MORE ASK FUZZY: Pill contents varied over time, and some variants included aloe laxatives. There were, however, concerns and, to control fake medicines, Theodore Roosevelt passed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration. That forced vendors to list active ingredients' purity levels on labels. While that may have had some effect, shelves today are lined with products that tap into nutrition anxiety. Concoctions promise "anti-aging" and "fusion health". They will even "fuel your cells"! In a curious coda to this story, George Fulford of G. T. Fulford & Company, who marketed the pills, died in a car accident in 1905, making him the first Canadian on record to die by automobile accident. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast: In 1899, what could best be described as an advertorial appeared in The Geelong Advertiser. The claims it made were astonishing and, if only half of them were true, everybody should be taking Dr William's Pink Pills For Pale People. The list of ailments for which it promised "certain cure" was apparently limitless: indigestion, pimples, skin diseases, liver and kidney troubles, biliousness, anaemia, sleeplessness, rheumatism, lumbago, loss of physical strength, neuralgia... Women should be especially keen because it included "all female irregularities", whatever that meant. If that wasn't enough, it was said to cure "debility" and "sick headaches", but they kept the best till last: "loss of vital forces". Indeed, one wonders why billions of dollars on medical research since then has been necessary since the Pink Pills would doubtlessly also cure COVID and AIDS. Dr Williams, of course, was just one in a long tradition of snake oil companies harvesting money from gullible people. The quack cure originated in Canada in the late 1800s and was marketed in numerous countries around the world, including Australia. In an early example of using influencers, advertisers enlisted prominent people to endorse their product. One (probably fictitious) Dr Guiseppi Lapponi - "Physician to the Vatican" - proclaimed that he had used Dr Williams' Pink Pills in his practice "with good results". Oddly enough, the pills might actually be helpful for "pale people" with anaemia. A 1909 examination by the British Medical Association found, along with liquorice and sugar, they contained iron supplements. Unfortunately, a third of the iron in the pink sugar-coated pills had oxidised. The pills, they noted, had been "very carelessly prepared". MORE ASK FUZZY: Pill contents varied over time, and some variants included aloe laxatives. There were, however, concerns and, to control fake medicines, Theodore Roosevelt passed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration. That forced vendors to list active ingredients' purity levels on labels. While that may have had some effect, shelves today are lined with products that tap into nutrition anxiety. Concoctions promise "anti-aging" and "fusion health". They will even "fuel your cells"! In a curious coda to this story, George Fulford of G. T. Fulford & Company, who marketed the pills, died in a car accident in 1905, making him the first Canadian on record to die by automobile accident. The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM. Send your questions to AskFuzzy@ Podcast:
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Finger-Licking History Of Artificial Sweeteners
For dieters, diabetics, and Diet Coke fanatics alike, there is perhaps no food-related scientific discovery of the last 200 years more important than artificial sweeteners. Once hailed as a group of miracle chemicals with all the sweetness of cane sugar yet no calories or negative side effects, artificial sweeteners are still incredibly popular today, but concerns about their health effects have grown. These days, you're most likely to see saccharin, sucralose, Ace-K, and aspartame used in diet and zero-sugar sodas, coffee additives, and sugar-free desserts, but once upon a time, many of the most common sweeteners on the market began as accidental lab discoveries by unsuspecting chemists. It all started with saccharin, which was discovered in 1878 and has been sold as a sugar replacement since the late 19th century. Amazingly, the chemist who first discovered saccharin's sweet taste did so by mistake, after tasting a residue on his fingers after a day of working in a lab with coal tar derivatives. Even more amazingly, both aspartame and cyclamate (the original compound used in Sweet'N Low) were discovered in a similar manner. These discoveries were instrumental in changing the course of food history as we know it. Read more: 15 Retro Food Trends From The '80s In 1878, two scientists named Ira Remsen and Constantin Fahlberg were working together at a John Hopkins University lab researching the oxidation of methylated sulfobenzoic acids and their amides, also known as coal tar derivatives. That probably doesn't mean a whole lot to those of us who haven't studied chemistry, but the most important outcome of their research was the accidental discovery of saccharin after Fahlberg tasted it on his hands at dinner one night. He eventually secured patents and began selling it commercially in the 1880s as the first known substitute for sugar, that much-beloved but unfortunately unhealthy sweetening agent. Unlike sugar, saccharin is not metabolized by the body and thus has no caloric content, despite being about 500 times sweeter than sucrose. When Fahlberg first tested the sweetener on himself, he found no adverse reactions to its consumption, but in the early 20th century, public concerns over food safety mounted. In response, the United States passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. But when FDA commissioner Harvey Washington Wiley attempted to ban saccharin, he was shot down by President Theodore Roosevelt, who himself had been prescribed the sweetener as a weight-loss regimen. In the decades that followed, so did a longstanding debate about the scientific evidence of saccharin's potential harmfulness, which was repeatedly deemed inconclusive. Saccharin was a common sugar substitute during wartime when sugar was scarce, but its prominence exploded in the mid-20th century when upticks in both health consciousness and prepackaged food consumption among Americans led to the creation of diet sodas, which became a popular drink of choice. The next artificial sweetener to hit the market was cyclamate, discovered in 1937 by a graduate student at the University of Illinois named Michael Sveda. Sveda was trying to create a new fever-reducing drug when, during a smoke break, he tasted a sweet substance on his fingers much like Fahlberg back in 1878. Cyclamate is only about 30 to 50 times sweeter than sugar but lacks the bitter aftertaste of saccharin, and the two were often used in combination, such as in packets of Sweet'N Low or in the formula of now-discontinued diet sodas like Coca-Cola's TaB. However, in the 1960s, studies linked cyclamate to the development of bladder cancer in rats, and in 1970 the FDA banned the substance as a potential carcinogenic, though it's still approved for use in Europe. In 1965, aspartame entered the field when researcher James Schlatter discovered yet another sweet taste after licking his fingers while working on an anti-ulcer drug. Two hundred times sweeter than sugar with almost zero caloric value, aspartame was approved for large-scale production in 1981 and quickly became the hot new sweetener of choice, particularly once it was marketed as NutraSweet and used to make Diet Coke. Like the other sweeteners, its safety and carcinogenic potential remain controversial, but aspartame is currently considered safe with an acceptable daily intake (ADI) limit. Since the late 20th century, more new sweeteners have entered the market, including sucralose, best known as Splenda, which was discovered in 1976 (more purposefully this time). It has since overtaken aspartame to become the most commercially popular artificial sweetener. Read the original article on Chowhound.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Return of Snake Oil
In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat 'women's weaknesses.' Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was the solution. Pinkham's matronly smile, printed on labels and advertisements, became as well known as Mona Lisa's. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was one of thousands of popular and lucrative patent medicines—health concoctions dreamed up by chemists, housewives, and entrepreneurs—that took the United States by storm in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These products promised to treat virtually any ailment and didn't have to reveal their recipes. Many contained alcohol, cocaine, morphine, or other active ingredients that ranged from dubious to dangerous. Dr. Guild's Green Mountain Asthmatic Compound was available in cigarette form and included the poisonous plant belladonna. Early versions of Wampole's Vaginal Cones, sold as a vaginal antiseptic and deodorizer, contained picric acid, a toxic compound used as an explosive during World War I. Patent-medicine advertisements were unavoidable; by the 1870s, 25 percent of all advertising was for patent medicines. After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the newly created Food and Drug Administration cracked down on miracle elixirs. But one American industry is still keeping the spirit of patent medicine alive: dietary supplements. In the U.S., vitamins, botanicals, and other supplements are minimally regulated. Some can improve people's health or address specific conditions, but many, like the medicines of old, contain untested or dangerous ingredients. Nevertheless, three-quarters of Americans take at least one. Some take far more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who's awaiting Senate confirmation to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has said he takes a 'fistful' of vitamins each day. Kennedy has in recent years championed dietary supplements and decried their 'suppression' by the FDA—an agency he would oversee as health secretary. Now he's poised to bring America's ever-growing supplement enthusiasm to the White House and supercharge the patent-medicine revival. The newly created FDA eventually required all pharmaceutical drugs—substances intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease—to be demonstrably safe and effective before they could be sold. But dietary supplements, as we call them now, were never subject to that degree of scrutiny. Vitamins were sold with little interference until the 'megadosing' trend of the late 1970s and '80s, which began after the chemist Linus Pauling started claiming that large amounts of vitamin C could stave off cancer and other diseases. The FDA announced its intention to regulate vitamins, but the public (and the supplement industry) revolted. Mel Gibson starred in a television ad in which he was arrested at home for having a bottle of Vitamin C, and more than 2.5 million people participated in a 'Save Our Supplements' letter-writing campaign. Congress stepped in, passing the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which officially exempted dietary supplements from the regulations that medications are subject to. Since then, the FDA has generally not been responsible for any premarket review of dietary supplements, and manufacturers have not usually had to reveal their ingredients. 'It's basically an honor system where manufacturers need to declare that their products are safe,' says S. Bryn Austin, a social epidemiologist and behavioral scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The agency will get involved only if something goes wrong after the supplement starts being sold. As long as they disclose that the FDA hasn't evaluated their claims, and that those claims don't involve disease, supplement makers can say that their product will do anything to the structure or function of the body. You can say that a supplement improves cognition, for example, but not that it treats ADHD. These claims don't have to be supported with any evidence in humans, animals, or petri dishes. In 1994, the dietary-supplement industry was valued at $4 billion. By 2020, it had ballooned to $40 billion. Patent-medicine creators once toured their products in traveling medicine shows and made trading cards that people collected, exchanged, and pasted into scrapbooks; today, supplement companies sponsor popular podcasts, Instagram stories are overrun with supplement ads, and influencers make millions selling their own branded supplements. The combination of modern wellness culture with lax regulations has left Americans with 19th-century-like problems: Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, has found a methamphetamine analogue in a workout supplement, and omberacetam, a Russian drug for traumatic brain injuries and mood disorders, in a product marketed to help with memory. Last year, Kennedy accused the FDA of suppressing vitamins and other alternative health products that fall into the dietary-supplement category. But 'there is no truth about the FDA being at war on supplements over the last several decades,' Cohen told me. 'In fact, they have taken an extremely passive, inactive approach.' Experts have repeatedly argued that the FDA needs more authority to investigate and act on supplements, not less. And yet, Kennedy continues to champion the industry. He told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he takes so many vitamins, 'I couldn't even remember them all.' Kennedy has vocally opposed additives in food and conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, but has failed to mention the dangerous additives in dietary supplements and the profits to be made in the supplement market. (Neither Kennedy nor a representative from the MAHA PAC responded to a request for comment.) In an already permissive environment, Kennedy's confirmation could signal to supplement manufacturers that anything goes, Cohen said. If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they're on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy's team did not respond to the Post.) A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, 'cleansing,' and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. 'Those types of products, in particular, play on people's insecurities,' she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can't be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can't force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can. Judy Z. Segal, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia who has analyzed patent-medicine trading cards from the 19th and 20th centuries, told me that supplement-marketing strategies 'have not changed that much since the patent-medicine era.' Patent medicines appealed to ambient, relatable complaints; one ad for Burdock's Blood Bitters asserted that there were 'thousands of females in America who suffer untold miseries from chronic diseases common to their sex.' And the makers of patent medicine, like many modern supplement companies, used friendly spokespeople and customer testimonials while positioning their products as preventive care; according to one ad for Hartshorn's Sarsaparilla, 'The first deviation from perfect health should receive attention.' In 1905, the muckracker Samuel Hopkins Adams lamented that 'gullible America' was so eager to 'swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.' Compounds and elixirs go by different names now—nootropics, detoxes, adaptogens—but if Adams walked down any supplement aisle or browsed Amazon, he'd still find plenty of cure-alls. He could even pick up a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham's Herbal Supplement, which is sold as an aid for menstruation and menopause. Pinkham's face smiles at buyers from the label, though its advertised benefits are now accompanied by a tiny disclaimer: 'This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
30-01-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Return of Snake Oil
In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat 'women's weaknesses.' Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was the solution. Pinkham's matronly smile, printed on labels and advertisements, became as well known as Mona Lisa's. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was one of thousands of popular and lucrative patent medicines—health concoctions dreamed up by chemists, housewives, and entrepreneurs—that took the United States by storm in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These products promised to treat virtually any ailment and didn't have to reveal their recipes. Many contained alcohol, cocaine, morphine, or other active ingredients that ranged from dubious to dangerous. Dr. Guild's Green Mountain Asthmatic Compound was available in cigarette form and included the poisonous plant belladonna. Early versions of Wampole's Vaginal Cones, sold as a vaginal antiseptic and deodorizer, contained picric acid, a toxic compound used as an explosive during World War I. Patent-medicine advertisements were unavoidable; by the 1870s, 25 percent of all advertising was for patent medicines. After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the newly created Food and Drug Administration cracked down on miracle elixirs. But one American industry is still keeping the spirit of patent medicine alive: dietary supplements. In the U.S., vitamins, botanicals, and other supplements are minimally regulated. Some can improve people's health or address specific conditions, but many, like the medicines of old, contain untested or dangerous ingredients. Nevertheless, three-quarters of Americans take at least one. Some take far more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who's awaiting Senate confirmation to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has said he takes a 'fistful' of vitamins each day. Kennedy has in recent years championed dietary supplements and decried their 'suppression' by the FDA—an agency he would oversee as health secretary. Now he's poised to bring America's ever-growing supplement enthusiasm to the White House and supercharge the patent-medicine revival. The newly created FDA eventually required all pharmaceutical drugs—substances intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease—to be demonstrably safe and effective before they could be sold. But dietary supplements, as we call them now, were never subject to that degree of scrutiny. Vitamins were sold with little interference until the 'megadosing' trend of the late 1970s and '80s, which began after the chemist Linus Pauling started claiming that large amounts of vitamin C could stave off cancer and other diseases. The FDA announced its intention to regulate vitamins, but the public (and the supplement industry) revolted. Mel Gibson starred in a television ad in which he was arrested at home for having a bottle of Vitamin C, and more than 2.5 million people participated in a 'Save Our Supplements' letter-writing campaign. Congress stepped in, passing the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which officially exempted dietary supplements from the regulations that medications are subject to. Since then, the FDA has generally not been responsible for any premarket review of dietary supplements, and manufacturers have not usually had to reveal their ingredients. 'It's basically an honor system where manufacturers need to declare that their products are safe,' says S. Bryn Austin, a social epidemiologist and behavioral scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The agency will get involved only if something goes wrong after the supplement starts being sold. As long as they disclose that the FDA hasn't evaluated their claims, and that those claims don't involve disease, supplement makers can say that their product will do anything to the structure or function of the body. You can say that a supplement improves cognition, for example, but not that it treats ADHD. These claims don't have to be supported with any evidence in humans, animals, or petri dishes. In 1994, the dietary-supplement industry was valued at $4 billion. By 2020, it had ballooned to $40 billion. Patent-medicine creators once toured their products in traveling medicine shows and made trading cards that people collected, exchanged, and pasted into scrapbooks; today, supplement companies sponsor popular podcasts, Instagram stories are overrun with supplement ads, and influencers make millions selling their own branded supplements. The combination of modern wellness culture with lax regulations has left Americans with 19th-century-like problems: Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, has found a methamphetamine analogue in a workout supplement, and omberacetam, a Russian drug for traumatic brain injuries and mood disorders, in a product marketed to help with memory. Last year, Kennedy accused the FDA of suppressing vitamins and other alternative health products that fall into the dietary-supplement category. But 'there is no truth about the FDA being at war on supplements over the last several decades,' Cohen told me. 'In fact, they have taken an extremely passive, inactive approach.' Experts have repeatedly argued that the FDA needs more authority to investigate and act on supplements, not less. And yet, Kennedy continues to champion the industry. He told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he takes so many vitamins, 'I couldn't even remember them all.' Kennedy has vocally opposed additives in food and conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, but has failed to mention the dangerous additives in dietary supplements and the profits to be made in the supplement market. (Neither Kennedy nor a representative from the MAHA PAC responded to a request for comment.) In an already permissive environment, Kennedy's confirmation could signal to supplement manufacturers that anything goes, Cohen said. If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they're on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy's team did not respond to the Post.) A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, 'cleansing,' and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. 'Those types of products, in particular, play on people's insecurities,' she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can't be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can't force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can. Judy Z. Segal, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia who has analyzed patent-medicine trading cards from the 19th and 20th centuries, told me that supplement-marketing strategies 'have not changed that much since the patent-medicine era.' Patent medicines appealed to ambient, relatable complaints; one ad for Burdock's Blood Bitters asserted that there were 'thousands of females in America who suffer untold miseries from chronic diseases common to their sex.' And the makers of patent medicine, like many modern supplement companies, used friendly spokespeople and customer testimonials while positioning their products as preventive care; according to one ad for Hartshorn's Sarsaparilla, 'The first deviation from perfect health should receive attention.' In 1905, the muckracker Samuel Hopkins Adams lamented that 'gullible America' was so eager to 'swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.' Compounds and elixirs go by different names now—nootropics, detoxes, adaptogens—but if Adams walked down any supplement aisle or browsed Amazon, he'd still find plenty of cure-alls. He could even pick up a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham's Herbal Supplement, which is sold as an aid for menstruation and menopause. Pinkham's face smiles at buyers from the label, though its advertised benefits are now accompanied by a tiny disclaimer: 'This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.'
