NIH adds 6,000 labels to Dietary Supplement Label Database

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently updated its Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD), which publicly lists label information for current and past dietary supplement products marketed in the United States. According to the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA; Silver Spring, MD), more than 6000 labels have been added to the database, which now contains label information for more than 136,000 products.

The goal of the database is to make information on supplements sold in the U.S. more accessible and transparent to the public, providing an overview of the burgeoning market, dating back to late 2011. Such transparency is encouraged by supplement industry leaders, with AHPA, in a press release, reporting, “AHPA has had a policy since 2015 to encourage members that market supplement products under their own brands to submit labels for inclusion in the DSLD. Many features of the modern DSLD reflect a request from AHPA for improvements to the database.”

The database was recently updated in July 2021 to make it more user-friendly. Said AHPA: “Users can also filter for products currently on the market and compare all products with the same ingredient.”

The new labels added include images submitted by supplement industry companies as well as information collected in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, AHPA said.

This database is also considered by some to be a jumping-off point for an eventual mandatory product listing that FDA may enact that would require supplement companies to list certain product information in a database. Some urge that already existing information in the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database should fulfill this requirement. Said AHPA: “AHPA’s Board of Trustees has adopted the position that if federal legislation is introduced to establish a mandatory product listing (MPL) requirement for dietary supplements, having labels in the DSLD must be sufficient to satisfy all listing requirements such that a separate label or listing submission would not be required.”