For a long time I’ve known (hopefully along with everyone else who takes lifting seriously) that the supplement industry (legal supplements, the products GNC, Vitamin Shoppe, etc carry) is different from the food industry because they do not have to get their products tested by the FDA. The FDA has to prove that the product is harmful in order for them to take it off the market.
As such, the health industry is full of misleading advertisments with doctored photoshoots, products claiming daily pound muscle gain, and misleading label ingredients which conceal what goes in the product. Open any health/bodybuilding magazine and look at the advertisements. They put normal advertisements to shame.
Heres a short clip from a Steroid Documentary called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which talks about the American culture and how it relates to Steroids. The whole clip is good, but the supplement part starts around 1:40, and the end shows the relative easieness of obtaining HGH (Human Growth Hormone).
Now I’m not talking about whether things should be legal or not, as in Steroids, supplements, drugs, etc. I know that Libertarians stress government prohibition of drugs creates more problems than it solves. But how do we respond to something like this? The supplement industry seems to have its problems such as the ones listed above, (including the fiasco of Hydroxycut and how it was taken off the market). Do we advocate environments like this, or is there something wrong that makes them different from an ideal libertarian scenario?
We advocate letting people make their own decisions. If they find they’ve chosen wrongly in the sense that they received no benefit from the item–lesson learned. If they find that they were sickened by the item when it was claimed to not do such, a tort can be brought. But we cannot save people from their own buyer’s remorse.
I think the supplement industry is a good reason to think the free market will regulate itself. While supp manufacturers want to make the easy buck and sell you a bad product at a high price, there a numerous checks and balances on these companies.
Websites like bodybuilding.com have numerous articles and reviews of products. It is very accessible. If one were to just pick their supplements from the top 10 selling supps, they’d be golden. Notice that the most successful supplement companies have been ON, BSN, Gaspari, Universal etc. I think we can all agree on the quality and price of these brands. The biggest lame brand is Muscletech, and they don’t really have any products that get more than a 7.5 rating on BB.com. Even MT’s products have some quality ingredients in them, even if the price is a little steep.
So I think that there is more than enough information out there for people to rely on. I chose my supplements by reading articles and cross checking them with reviews. I think most people on BB.com do this. Even less savvy consumers who go into GNC and say I WANNA GET BIG FAST usually get handed something like sizeon by gaspari.
I think regulating the industry would shut down a lot of the more efficient brands and stop them from entering the market. I mean gaspari is new but they’ve really taken off. How lost would we be without this kind of competition? It would be an oligopoly and we’d be paying 100 bucks for 5lbs of whey :P.
p.s. this thread just kills me. I have a shoulder injury so I haven’t lifted in 3 months ><
government law is partially responsible for the gullibility in certain consumers, who naively believe the statist myth that magically the state protects.
its said on TV it must be true, since if it was not true, the TV people would be in jail for false advertising since the government monitor truth in advertising and the government are infallible therefore the advertising that we see must all be true.
Seems to me like the fiasco surrounding Hydroxicut is the market at work. They’ve got a new formula out now. Now I bet they’re a lot more diligent in making sure they’re product don’t kill people.