Food and dietary supplements has taken over the market during past few decades. Many people are busy with their lifestyle which may cause them excessive fat and some people want to build some mass and they would need to have some dietary or food supplement. But what if the supplement you are about to take would affect your health? Food and Drug Administration has updated a list of supplements that has done any harm to anyone using any of it.
All about FDA Database
You can access this update by visiting their official website; it has been created with all the complaints received by people by using any kind of supplements.
Once you report something on their website FDA is going to review your complaint and after confirmation they add it to their database. All that data has been personally collected by FDA for years but now they have recently made it public. As FDA wants people to know exactly they are getting themselves into.
Consumers as well as manufactures could find out problems people are facing with their products and can work on it to make it better. If you take some protein you can search for it to see if someone else has reported any sickness they got using it.
Researchers with questions about why some supplements are still there in the market even after a bunch of complaints against them could write FDA and they are going to provide you the reasons behind it.
Earlier, this information could be accessible through a request but that would take months due to too many requests. Now people can download an XLS file for free with all the available data.
It’s possible that you might have had some health issues by using some supplements but you have never reported it to FDA but there are people who did for last 12 years they have received over 56k complaints.
More than 26k complaints were about consuming some food which caused some issue and 25k was about supplements and almost 4k is about cosmetics but they have a completely different category to report products related to them.
As mentioned earlier most people do not have time to report a product so most of these reports were from medical related people. Few of them were from consumers or in rear cases were from lawyers.
As most of the people do not report the problems so you won’t find everything about a supplement in it. You might find multiple complaints about world’s most famous supplements but this could happen because higher of number of consumption of that supplement throughout the world. The one thing you won’t find in it is exact percentage of people who are satisfied and not satisfied with the product.
Also you can’t determine if the effects were because of some personal allergy they already had before starting it. Like some people has issue with peanut or has m lactose intolerance which is one of things that are already listed on most of the supplements telling people to consult to their physician before taking it.
Summary
It’s a good thing that you finally can access some of the information which has never been accessible before to the public but you won’t find exactly what you are looking for as we do not know if the problem happened genuinely or because of some health issue the person already had.