20th October
New High Strength Pills and Potions?
We may soon be noticing an increasing amount of high strength vitamins and minerals hitting the shelves; these are rumoured to be in the pipeline from pharmaceutical companies.
I presume that these will be marketed to help with long term health and plug the gap in nutrients which are slowly being reduced / eroded from the food we eat due to reasons such as overcooking, intensive farming methods and long term storage by supermarkets.
It will be interesting to see which vitamins and minerals will be chosen for the high strength capsules and whether these will take the form of single ingredient or multivitamin types. This may help us understand which pill and potions have been identified by the big boys as beneficial.
From a commercial viewpoint, which route will they take to market? Are these going to be available to us to buy on the high street/online or only available via prescription? In the USA, there are been a number of reports over recent years about the pharmaceutical industry trying to nudge supplements off the shelf. There was a campaign claiming since supplements were not regulated as drugs, that they were therefore unsafe for example. However, this soon lost momentum by articles from less biased sources such as Forbes reporting that Vioxx alone had killed in the order of 60,000 patients.
It is quite unlikely that such tactics will work in the UK; can you imagine the financial and time impact on the NHS of us making appointments with our GP to prescribe us fish oils and Vitamin D? Not to mention the cost of paying prescription charges for something that is currently available over the counter for significantly less!
Equally we’ll be watching to see how the products will be marketed and whether any claims made will flaunt those permitted by the European Food Standards Agency.
Whether this means that High strength Vitamin C may well return to the shelves in Europe remains to be seen as currently, in most EU countries, anything above 200mg is not allowed.
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