The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994

The DSHEA Act of 1994 provides FDA with appropriate regulatory authority while still allowing consumers to have the desired access to a wide variety of affordable, high quality, safe and beneficial dietary supplement products.

I want to share some of the important points from the act before sharing the whole act itself:

• Use of safe nutritional supplements will limit the incidence of chronic diseases, and reduce long-term health care expenditures

• Consumers should be empowered to make choices about preventive health care programs based on data from scientific studies of health benefits related to particular dietary supplements

• National surveys have revealed that almost 50 percent of the 260,000,000 Americans regularly consume dietary supplements of vitamins, minerals, or herbs as a means of improving their nutrition

• The nutritional supplement industry is an integral part of the economy of the United States; the industry consistently projects a positive trade balance

• Although the Federal Government should take swift action against products that are unsafe or adulterated, the Federal Government should not take any actions to impose unreasonable regulatory barriers limiting or slowing the flow of safe products and accurate information to consumers      

To read the entire Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 visit:

https://ods.od.nih.gov/About/DSHEA_Wording.aspx