This article feels annoyingly incomplete or very poorly edited.
In December 1972, concerned that people were consuming larger and larger quantities of vitamins, the F.D.A. announced a plan to regulate vitamin supplements containing more than 150 percent of the recommended daily allowance. Vitamin makers would now have to prove that these “megavitamins” were safe before selling them. Not surprisingly, the vitamin industry saw this as a threat, and set out to destroy the bill. In the end, it did far more than that.
Industry executives recruited William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, to introduce a bill preventing the F.D.A. from regulating megavitamins. On Aug. 14, 1974, the hearing began.
Speaking in support of F.D.A. regulation was Marsha Cohen, a lawyer with the Consumers Union. Setting eight cantaloupes in front of her, she said, “You would need to eat eight cantaloupes — a good source of vitamin C — to take in barely 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C. But just these two little pills, easy to swallow, contain the same amount.” She warned that if the legislation passed, “one tablet would contain as much vitamin C as all of these cantaloupes, or even twice, thrice or 20 times that amount. And there would be no protective satiety level.” Ms. Cohen was pointing out the industry’s Achilles’ heel: ingesting large quantities of vitamins is unnatural, the opposite of what manufacturers were promoting.
A little more than a month later, Mr. Proxmire’s bill passed by a vote of 81 to 10. In 1976, it became law. Decades later, Peter Barton Hutt, chief counsel to the F.D.A., wrote that “it was the most humiliating defeat” in the agency’s history.
Well, what more did the industry do than destroy the bill? After making such a strong clear case for regulation, how did the bill forbidding it pass with such an overwhelming majority? Were there payoffs, or was it something the vitamin makers said in testimony, or did they gin up a massive publicity campaign, or what? I'm quite frustrated at how little information this article contains.
On the plus side, I'm glad that I've stuck to getting my vitamins from food rather than supplements.
> Well, what more did the industry do than destroy the bill?
I don't want to talk about a monolithic "The Industry". But there's no doubt that some companies and people involved in mega-dosing or in vitamin supplements are evil. I don't mean wishy-washy "making lots of money and being a bit cynical" kind of evil, I mean actually evil.
Mathias Rath has probably caused the death and infection of very many people in South Africa because of his AIDS denialism and promotion of vitamins as a cure for AIDS. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Rath)
Patrick Holford has written books with titles like "Food is better medicine than drugs: your prescription for drug free health" - people are turning away from conventional medicine and using multivitamins. He's not as scummy as Rath, but he's pretty scummy. Selling vitamins as a cancer-cure to desperate people when there's no evidence that it works is unpleasant.
Why hasn't this issue been revisited in congress? Shouldn't everything be revisited very X years to ensure that the law is still relevant with current information?
In December 1972, concerned that people were consuming larger and larger quantities of vitamins, the F.D.A. announced a plan to regulate vitamin supplements containing more than 150 percent of the recommended daily allowance. Vitamin makers would now have to prove that these “megavitamins” were safe before selling them. Not surprisingly, the vitamin industry saw this as a threat, and set out to destroy the bill. In the end, it did far more than that.
Industry executives recruited William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, to introduce a bill preventing the F.D.A. from regulating megavitamins. On Aug. 14, 1974, the hearing began.
Speaking in support of F.D.A. regulation was Marsha Cohen, a lawyer with the Consumers Union. Setting eight cantaloupes in front of her, she said, “You would need to eat eight cantaloupes — a good source of vitamin C — to take in barely 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C. But just these two little pills, easy to swallow, contain the same amount.” She warned that if the legislation passed, “one tablet would contain as much vitamin C as all of these cantaloupes, or even twice, thrice or 20 times that amount. And there would be no protective satiety level.” Ms. Cohen was pointing out the industry’s Achilles’ heel: ingesting large quantities of vitamins is unnatural, the opposite of what manufacturers were promoting.
A little more than a month later, Mr. Proxmire’s bill passed by a vote of 81 to 10. In 1976, it became law. Decades later, Peter Barton Hutt, chief counsel to the F.D.A., wrote that “it was the most humiliating defeat” in the agency’s history.
Well, what more did the industry do than destroy the bill? After making such a strong clear case for regulation, how did the bill forbidding it pass with such an overwhelming majority? Were there payoffs, or was it something the vitamin makers said in testimony, or did they gin up a massive publicity campaign, or what? I'm quite frustrated at how little information this article contains.
On the plus side, I'm glad that I've stuck to getting my vitamins from food rather than supplements.