Regulations for Vitamins

In response to “Truth in Labeling Goes for Vitamins, Too,” editorial, Nov. 15:

It was not the tiny “supplement industry” that forced a (temporary) delay to the FDA’s tender ministrations. It was the enormous number of vitamin users who take responsibility for their own well-being. The truly huge drug industry and “health” industry hate this--cuts down on profits, doesn’t it.

RAY DORFMAN, Woodland Hills

Nobody in the vitamin industry has any problem with labels for vitamins and health supplements. This labeling legislation is just a smoke screen for the power play the FDA is making on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. Let’s keep our right to choose how to heal--holistically or by FDA-approved drugs. This is not about labeling, it is about freedom.

LARRY GOODERMONT, Los Angeles

I applaud your position and am appalled that anyone’s greed would cause them to oppose rules that require a product be safe to use and be truthful in its labeling.

The nutritional supplement industry must be throwing a lot of money around to gain needed congressional support. Both senators from California support a bill that would bar the FDA from curbing the current health scams that are pretty obvious to anyone that studies the products on the shelves of a health food store.

This issue is not as simple as just consumers being ripped off versus not adding regulations that would further impede our free enterprise system. It also involves the health and lives of people such as those who in 1989 consumed tainted L-tryptophan that killed 40 people and damaged 1,500 more. I can only pray that your spouse does not require nurses 18 hours a day and the help of a ventilator to breathe when she sleeps, as mine now does. FDA rules and reasonable information might have kept a Japanese manufacturer, who was known to be irresponsible from prior problems, from doing it again in 1989 with contaminated L-tryptophan. The Hatch-Richardson bill will keep the FDA from providing this needed protection for consumers, trading it for protecting the profits of “health food” merchants.

ROBERT W. DINGMAN, Westlake Village

Prof. Linus Pauling’s article (Commentary, Oct. 15) illustrates a continuing confusion about vitamins, and adds to the public’s cache of misinformation. This includes the misperception that the Food and Drug Administration is power-hungry and relentlessly interferes with the public’s freedom to medicate itself.

On the contrary, the food supplement industry is now the least regulated in the U.S., with the FDA nearly incapacitated to enforce the weak laws that now exist. The Hatch and Richardson bills now before Congress would allow more claims than are proved, and would let distributors decide on a claim’s validity.

The FDA’s power to regulate supplements was decimated by laws passed in the 1970s, laws backed by the industry. The recent Nutrition Education and Labeling Act strengthened the FDA’s hand to prevent false health claims for supplements. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) succeeded in delaying enforcement while he composed his bill, which would again weaken FDA’s enforcement of truth-in-labeling regulations. Large numbers of supplement distributors are in Utah.

WALLACE SAMPSON MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine