There’s this hilarious myth floating around that the dietary supplement industry is unregulated. Spoiler alert: it’s not true. I’ve been shouting this from the LinkedIn rooftops so much that my voice is starting to sound like RFK Jr’s. As someone who can identify roots (and all other plant and fungal parts) like a pro, because I am a pro, let’s dig into the root cause of this ridiculous false narrative.

{shifts foil hat}

First up, we have a tangled mess of a broken medical system and the almighty “Mainstream Media.” It’s almost like big pharma doesn’t want you to know that, in conjunction with healthy lifestyle choices, taking vitamins, herbs, functional mushrooms, and nutraceuticals can actually reduce your need for their precious drugs. The media, ever the puppets for hire, have been spreading disinformation about our industry for decades, with the New York Times leading the pack. Consumers who want to take control of their health end up losing trust in some of nature’s best gifts. But hey, the tide may be turning. A recent Health and Nutrition event was dubbed the “woo woo caucus” by the media, and a few short weeks later, with RFK Jr potentially at the helm of HHS, now everyone’s talking about the poisons in our food system.

{removes foil hat, grabs calculator]

The second root cause is even simpler: it’s us. Yep, we did it. The dietary supplement industry is a major reason why people think it’s unregulated, because we don’t tell consumers about the work we do to meet regulatory requirements. This same regulatory compliance work also illustrates many of a company’s quality safeguards. We do a terrible job of sharing our quality story. So terrible, in fact, that I had to create “Elan’s Super-Biased Quality Index” to prove it.

I firmly believe that “what can be measured can be improved.” After a quick internet search, I found no quality index for our industry. So, I made one. Elan’s Super-Biased Quality Index is a 5-point scale ranging from “no quality story” = 0 to “shares all batch-to-batch lab results at the customer level” = 5, with a few phases in between. For 1 point, “Quality” had to be mentioned on the website. For 2 points, there needed to be a page dedicated to their quality story. For 3 points, there needed to be data about lab tests or labs testing. For 4 points, lab results had to be available.

When I secretly deployed this index at an industry CEO event 2 years ago, the results were so bad they almost supported the misconception that our industry is unregulated. A year later, I indexed a similar group, and the results were still so bad I had to share them. Anonymously, of course, because I’m not trying to defecate where I masticate…

The good news? We have a diagnosis, and a cure. Our industry is suffering from a severe deficiency of quality stories. Start telling them.