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Supplement safety: Adulteration and contamination remain worldwide problems

Industry and regulators must tackle global issues like adulteration, contamination, adverse reports, and online compliance to make food supplements safe, an expert says.

Over the past few months, a series of safety concerns have hit the global dietary supplements industry.

In February, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigated a salmonella outbreak linked to moringa powder. In January, South Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDA) started re-evaluation of tumeric and green coffee beans due to adverse reports.

At the end of last year, Health Canada called for warnings on turmeric for risk of hepatotoxicity. And the Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program also published two reviews around the adulteration of ginseng and tumeric.

According to Luca Bucchini, owner and managing director of Hylobates Consulting, these are just a few examples of safety issues in the global dietary supplements market.

“In the last decade, there has been a growing recognition that whilst dietary supplements are intrinsically safer than most food products, due to formats and lower water content, as the industry grows with more players, attention to food safety is necessary, from chemical and microbial contaminants to the inherent safety of some substances,” Bucchini told Ingredients Network.

Adulteration, for example, remains “an enormous problem, which receives too little attention in Europe”, he said, and microbiology is still a “standard food safety problem”.

“As for hepatotoxicity and other adverse reports, across the world we are seeing difficulties in evaluating risks and making decisions based on adverse events because there are no established methodology and standards. We have still not devised an effective methodology for dealing with botanicals that guarantees safe innovation.”

Regulators need ‘adequate resources’

Bucchini said regulatory actions within all of this can be improved globally.

“In a generally safe industry, vigilance on safety is still important. Unfortunately, regulators are not doing a very good job,” he said. In the EU, for example, whilst testing and safety awareness is increasing, he said regulators are often focused on the wrong issues. In the US, problems arise where enforcement lack resources, he added.

“It takes concerted effort with scientists and regulators. Unfortunately, regulators are often distracted and do not start with the real problems. Helping them focus is up to industry.”

So, does the global supplements market simply need more regulation? “Whilst more regulation is sometimes necessary, often the solution is providing adequate resources and teeth to enforcement agencies,” Bucchini said.

In addition to this, it is key that political pressures do not take precedence over scientific considerations, he said.

“In some parts of the world, like the US, politics is not helping. In the EU, there is an apparent desire to ban some substances requiring absolute safety or to make the industry less competitive, with little apparent interest in improving quality and safety of the vast food supply.”

E-commerce and social media

On top of this, Bucchini said compliance has become more of an issue worldwide amidst the rise of e-commerce and social media. “E-commerce has been with us now for two decades. Some platforms have improved in their compliance. The problem is that some have not, and new entrants may be even less compliant.”

In addition to this, compliance on social media “is even lower”, he explained, with some social media posts sometimes driving consumers towards unsafe products.

“The main challenge, simply put, is that as long as e-commerce and social media platforms are allowed to not require compliance, and ignore local laws and regulators, the problem will be with us.”