Last week, Senator John McCain introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate that would allow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to more effectively regulate dietary supplements. The bill is known as the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010. The bill is meant to protect all Americans, including teenagers, from purchasing dietary supplements that contain dangerous steroids.
Dietary supplements are promoted as legal and safe ways to increase athletic prowess or physical appearance. Current law allows dietary supplements to enter the U.S. marketplace and be sold in stores and online without first obtaining approval from the FDA. The proposed law would require dietary supplement facilities to register with the FDA, to identify of all their products and product ingredients, to report more adverse affects to the FDA and to keep better records. The only ingredients that could be included in dietary supplements would be those that are on a list approved by the FDA, under the proposed law.
Many groups have already come out in support of this bill including the U.S. Anti Doping Agency, the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the U.S. Olympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and many individual Olympians and professional sports players.
What do you think? If enacted, will the proposed law adequately protect people from the dietary supplements that contain illegal steroids?
