You know that small type on nearly every bottle of vitamins and weight-loss pills and health food. Buy enough of them and you can say it from memory: "This statements has not been evaluated by the FDA."
What if the FDA did evaluate these claims? Every last one of them, from the outrageous "lose 30 pounds in two days!" pills to the more reasonable "helps lower cholesterol" claims on the sides of cereal boxes. If the FDA looked at all these claims, how many would be false?
The European Union passed a law two years ago essentially doing that.
They're now just getting around to testing the products and surprise, surprise -- a majority of the claims are untrue. According to the European Food Safety Authority (the EU's FDA), "Only nine of the 43 claims examined so far are valid."
That's
barely more than 20 percent! More than three-fourths of product makers are lying
about what they do. Granted the EU has a long way to go -- it still has
to test 4,000 more products by 2010 -- but food makers are already
worried. They're countering the EU's standards by calling them "the
strictest in the world" and saying these tests will "handcuff" the
industry.
The EU standards aren't really strict. They basically
say, we're going to test your claim and test it on humans. It's already rejected mega-company Unilever's claim that its black tea "helps to
focus attention."
But Unilever can still advertise that message here in the United States
because the FDA has taken a hands-off approach. But the EU isn't
handcuffing companies, it's making them tell the truth. Hopefully President Barack Obama
will take a look at what the EU's doing and consider a similar
program as he starts overhauling the FDA.
Until then, remember that 80 percent of the time, a product's claim is likely to be false.
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