Industry coalition reissues advisory against use of dietary supplements as swine flu remedy, cure

NEW YORK If there’s a huckster swindling supplements as the latest cure-all, turns out it’s not a supplement they’re swindling after all. If not an illicit pharmaceutical outright, it’s at the very least a mismarketed snake oil, and this band of supplement associations is helping to stamp those hucksters out.

That’s better news for brick-and-mortar retailers of supplement products than it is for any online retailers, because many of the supplements being marketed inappropriately are sold almost exclusively online or maybe in smaller specialty channels, but not in mass. That’s a matter of simple economics — it costs quite a bit of capital to feed a mass channel supply chain, and there aren’t any legitimate companies, supplier or retailer, that’d risk that kind of investment to sell an illegal product.

So the more these companies making such illegal claims as “Nature’s Swine Flu Cure,” or companies incorporating actual pharmaceuticals into products claiming to enhance performance, are outed as companies not to be trusted, and the more consumers associate those pitches as appearing only online, during late-night infomercials (not available in stores!) or through emails automatically routed to the junk mail box, the more community pharmacies become the go-to source for any supplement-related health information.