What’s wrong with the supplement industry?
There are a lot of problems with the supplement industry in its current form.
Today’s supplement industry is irresponsible, characterised by unstandardised,
unproven extracts on the basis of a wing and a prayer. The largest sector of the
supplement industry, the billion-dollar fish oil industry, is a complete
confidence trick. We know fish oil doesn't work and yet people go on buying it
for no good reason and the companies keep on selling it because it's good
business. Same for multivitamins.
The regulation is extremely poor. Most of it is focused on preventing
manufactures of supplements saying exactly what their products can do. The
burden of proof is excessively high and at the same time there are no
regulations in place to prevent the large numbers of very shoddy and
dysfunctional products being put onto the market.
The medical world doesn’t focus on preventative health.
By the time a patient goes to a doctor, it’s often too late. Rather like a
fire engine arriving at a house fire long after the house is burnt
three-quarters of the way to the ground. Medics also arrive too late, and when
they do, the tools that they have are too trivial as they merely treat the
symptoms.
For years, big pharma has shown no interest in preventative health. Instead,
their focus is placed in treating symptoms, rather than preventing disease
occurring in the first place.
The bulk of the medical business is not in cure but in treatment. Doctors
tend to come onto the scene very late in the day, because they’re mainly
treating chronic degenerative diseases. These burn slowly, under the surface, in
a preclinical phase without the patient realising and it takes a long time to
reach the point where so much healthy tissue has been destroyed, that the
patient now starts to notice symptoms such as pain or disability.
We’re a desperately unhealthy population.
We are a desperately unhealthy population, which the medical profession
hasn’t managed to address. And the reason for this is they don’t have the right
tools to prevent conditions from occurring. Drugs aren’t the answer; we need to
undo the problems that are creating the growing public health disaster. These
tools are nutritional. This is where true prevention lies.
The supplement industry is misleading. We need better regulation.
The supplement industry lacks regulation and ultimately puts consumers at risk.
90% of the industry is unproven and the regulatory climate needs to be stricter.
Anyone can borrow an FDA claim. Peer-reviewed ingredients aren’t allowed to make
a medicinal claim. Contents should match label claims, but these are not
rigorously checked. This is a terrible commercial model.
The current regulatory system makes it impossible for the few companies like
LYMA who are formulating with validated nutritional ingredients to talk truthfully
about what they have. So, the consumer has the worst of all possible worlds as
the companies who are in a position to offer solutions are unable to legally talk
about it.
The evidence for wide scale dysnutriton, the evidence for the therapeutic
effects of nutritonal enhancement from epidemiological research, preclinical
models, clinical trials is overwhelming and yet the regulatory system has not
yet taken this into account.
In an unregulated market, it’s important for a new regulatory system to start
to take responsibility for looking at the real, 21st century science that’s
being done in this sector. Allowing responsible brands to speak about
ingredients that have been shown repeatedly in a range of studies to exert
benefits.
At the moment we have this very odd situation where you have a lot of
companies in the supplement sector who clearly, when you look at what they're
selling, have no idea about what it is that they are selling, and consumers who
are completely misinformed, and who don't know what they're buying. You wouldn't
want to run a railroad on this basis or any other kind of industry.
What can be done to help prevent chronic degenerative disease?
Pharmaco-nutritional tools can do far more than pharma-tools, so far as
preventative disease is concerned. They’re acting in a far more profound way.
They're resetting the metabolic errors that actually drive chronic degenerative
disease. So, they're getting to the heart of the matter in a way that
pharmaceutical tools simply cannot do.
I think that it's time to bring a little bit of clarity and rigor to this
sector because now that evidence-based nutrition is coming of age, we need to
find a way that make it possible to convey this information in simple, but
honest ways, to the consumers who can then use it to improve their own health.
We need a new regulatory system.
Why LYMA is in a class of its own?
Unlike the majority of the supplement industry that formulates with low
quality, unproven, ingredients, LYMA only uses peer-reviewed, validated
ingredients. This is the highest category of supplementation available. Each
ingredient has been fully characterised and fully standardised, so that you know
exactly what the active component is, and you can guarantee that there is a
standard amount of this active present in every capsule. You can guarantee
furthermore that this is present in a bioavailable form, and you have proven
that it is both safe and non-toxic, and also effective in preclinical and then
in clinical trials.
This is the way forwards, and that is what is increasingly being described as
evidence-based nutrition. This is LYMA. This is the future for nutrition.
