NPA's Fabricant derails HBO exposé on supplements

WASHINGTON - In response to an HBO expose on sports nutrition supplements sold on military bases, the Natural Products Association's CEO and executive director Daniel Fabricant, former director of the Dietary Supplements Division at the Food and Drug Administration, published a rebuttal on HBO’s Real Sports segment that attempted to link “Orrin Hatch’s dietary supplement legislation to military fatalities.” 

 

The op-ed was published in the Salt Lake Tribune on Friday. 

 

"Here we go again.  'HBO Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel' is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with those falsely claiming that dietary supplements are unregulated," Fabricant opened. "It may make for sensational media coverage posing as investigative reporting, but it is far from being accurate."

 

Fabricant argued that not only are supplements regulated, the enforcement of those regulations have pulled illegal products off of the market and landed their proprietors in jail. "John Edward Mullikin, who was falsely promoting a weight loss product, is now serving time in a federal prison after being sentenced in June, 2013," he said, citing an example of how FDA enforced the law during his tenure.

 

Fabricant also took exception with HBO's report that the supplement industry lobbied to water down regulations through its support of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

 

"All of the critics who conveniently ignore the past 20 years of federal oversight of this industry are also ignoring the fact that former President Bill Clinton, Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Congressman John Dingell, D-Mich. — what many would consider a pantheon of consumer safety advocates — supported the law," Fabricant added. "I guess these Democrat Hall-of-Famers are just pawns of the dietary supplement industry, too."