Posts Tagged ‘FDA’

A remarkable collaboration is taking shape to set a higher bar for the quality and safety of dietary supplements. This week in Washington the Dietary Supplement Quality Collaborative (DSQC) brought together people from the supplement industry with consumer advocates, health professionals, and scientific organizations. This group has been taking shape over the last year. The shared […]

It’s a perfect narrative. A brave entrepreneur making healthy snack bars is putting his money on the line to bring us truth in nutrition. Daniel Lubetzky, founder and owner of Kind Bars LLC, announced Tuesday that he is funding the creation of a new nonprofit. He will call it Feed the Truth. And thus, Little […]

Dietary supplements live in a unique regulatory space. That space lies somewhere between food and drugs. Sometimes that’s just fine. Vitamins and minerals that your body really needs can be well-regulated for purity and safety. But therapeutic agents also squeeze into this space. For example, glucosamine and chondroitin supplements advertise benefits like “joint mobility.” People with […]

The new year brings new expectations. Sure, we always have new diet, nutrition, and weight loss fashions. But, in thinking about obesity and health, we can also expect some more substantive changes. Here’s our top ten for 2017. 1. More “Less Added Sugar.” Already, the pressure to avoid sugar was on. Now, new labeling for added sugar will dial […]

Have you noticed that lots of milk doesn’t come from mammary glands these days? Eager to tap into consumer fancies, innovators are offering up just about any kind of plant-based milk you can imagine. Almond, soy, flax, rice, hazelnut, hemp, quinoa, and cashew milk are some of the options. For rose milk, you still have […]

Over the last four years, four new obesity meds gained approval and only one lived up to expectations in the marketplace – the Saxenda brand of liraglutide 3 mg from Novo Nordisk. The company reported quarterly results last week. Saxenda sales, growing impressively, are on track to surpass $200 million for the year. Net profit for […]

To understand the potential for harm from herbal and dietary supplements (HDS) for weight loss, consider this observation recently published in Hepatology: HDS-induced liver injury now accounts for 20% of cases of hepatotoxicity in the United States based on research data. The major implicated agents include anabolic steroids, green tea extract, and multi-ingredient nutritional supplements (MINS). This observation […]

FDA wants to know what it means to call a food product “healthy.” They have a definition that dates back to 1992. Based on that definition, fat-free, high carb foods counted as healthy. Foods with beneficial fats, like avocados and almonds, didn’t meet the definition. FDA Director Nutrition and Food Labeling Douglas Balentine knows that change […]

Targeting obesity with new treatments presents remarkable challenges. For evidence of this harsh reality, look at the sharply contrasting news this week for two potential new drugs: beloranib and setmelanotide. All work on beloranib was canceled by its developer, Zafgen. Almost simultaneously, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals published breakthrough results in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) […]

Eisai and Arena Pharmaceuticals announced this week that they received final approval from FDA for once-daily lorcaserin, which will be sold as Belviq XR for long-term obesity treatment. The real question is: what will this mean for the product, the patients who can benefit from it, and for obesity care more broadly? This approval will […]