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Of course, few users of supplements want the agency to tell them what they can and can't take. "I would be horrified if this little bit of autonomy were taken away," says Teresa Tudury, 48, who has been taking vitamins and other diet aids since a 1986 bout with Epstein-Barr virus left her with "unbearable fatigue."
The absence of tight oversight has allowed makers of herbal products to flourish, particularly in Utah, where the dry desert air helps keeps raw materials and pills and capsules fresh, and where land and skilled labor have been relatively inexpensive. Utah's free-enterprise culture has nurtured characters like Tom Murdock, an Arizona entrepreneur who in 1969 started what is now Murdock Madaus Schwabe, whose Nature's Way line is the top-selling herbal brand in health-food stores. Murdock founded the company to market the chaparral herb, which he had used to treat his cancer-stricken wife.
Today closely held Murdock Madaus Schwabe crushes and packages herbs in a factory the size of several football fields. Farther up I-15, near Salt Lake City, neighboring Nature's Herbs is in the midst of its third expansion in four years--this one aimed at tripling production to 2 million capsules an hour. That kind of growth enabled Nature's Herbs, a unit of Twinlab of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., to boost its sales 50% last year.
With the invasion of pharmaceutical companies, the entire supplements industry is braced for a shake-out. In the long run, the new arrivals could bring more testing and standardization to the market. But in the interim, their presence may prompt more corner cutting by companies that are pressured on price and that may respond by diluting potency and quality. The new arrivals "are bringing marketing dollars and something very important to the industry--consumer awareness and legitimacy," says Matthew Patsky, managing director of the investment bank Adams, Harkness and Hill. "What you're going to see is a dramatic increase in consumer awareness of what these products are for."
That will happen naturally as the newcomers slug it out with big-bucks ad campaigns. Bayer and Whitehall-Robins are spending a total of $75 million between them to launch their herbal brands. Bayer, sensing the public's confusion about such products, decided not to cite herbs in the names of its new One-A-Day preparations but to use tags like Cold Season and Memory and Concentration instead. Says brand manager Michaela Griggs: "We found that consumers don't fully understand what herbs do."
Such rival brands are emphasizing their quality to health seekers like Shirley Palmer, 66, a Los Angeles writer who pops ginkgo and ginseng and a handful of vitamins on the say-so of friends and news reports. "I have no evidence that these things really work," Palmer says. "I take them on faith." But they keep her away from the doctor, she says, and that's good because "I don't have time to sit around waiting in doctors' offices." Like Palmer, millions of Americans are using ancient remedies to broaden the range of modern health-care choices. And these flowering gifts from the past can be powerful medicine--but handle with care.
--Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, William Dowell and Aixa M. Pascual/New York, Richard Woodbury/Salt Lake City and other bureaus