The problem, though, is with the wild, little-regulated nutritional supplement industry.
This is not just about drug cheats and rogue scientists, but also about more closely regulating the nutritional supplement industry and not just coming down hard on athletes.
Worse, perhaps, is the $25 billion nutritional supplement industry, offerings pills that make exaggerated health claims and steroid-based hormones that can have significant bad consequences.
PRICE MAY NOT MEAN QUALITY While the Food and Drug Administration regulates vitamins as part of the nutritional supplement industry, it does not test them before they are put on the shelves.
In 1994, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch from — where else? — Utah sponsored a law, according to Elkind, "that deregulated the nutritional supplement industry, allowing it to sell products without prior F.D.A. review".
SALT LAKE CITY — A drive along mountain-lined Interstate 15 here shows why Senator Orrin G. Hatch is considered a hero in this region nicknamed the Silicon Valley of the nutritional supplement industry.
Though it no longer dominates the market for creatine, EAS continues to be a leader in the estimated $1.5 billion-a-year sports nutritional supplement industry.
Hatch, a well-known ally of the nutritional supplement industry, has regularly defended "natural" medicine in Congress, a cause that has attracted criticism among those concerned about the current lack of regulation in the market.
If some companies exit the industry, there may be a demand for products that might be filled by American, Asian, and European companies, which have already captured 75% of the global nutritional product industry [18].
The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts.
