Dietary supplement industry cheers RFK Jr.’s HHS nomination

Dietary supplement industry sources are enthusiastic over President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

But even if the environmental lawyer is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, in what could be a contentious hearing, his direct impact on the commodity and one of the agencies that falls under the authority of HHS — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — remains to be seen.

In an interview on Nov. 6 before he was nominated as secretary of HHS, Kennedy told NBC News that Trump made him an offer he “couldn’t refuse,” namely to end the “chronic disease epidemic” plaguing the U.S. On Oct. 25, on the social media platform X, Kennedy blasted FDA while suggesting that vitamins and nutraceuticals are among the products stifled by the agency that play a role in promoting the health of Americans.

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” wrote RFK Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was fatally shot in 1968 amid a campaign to be president. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

Related:Donald Trump’s election offers peril and promise to dietary supplement industry, insiders say

Élan Sudberg, CEO of Alkemist Labs, a botanical plant testing company, said he was “stoked” about Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS. On Nov. 19, 2023, Sudberg met RFK Jr. at a private event in Ojai, California.

“I said to him, ‘Our industry needs a champion,’” Sudberg recalled in an email to SupplySide Supplement Journal. “He asked what industry, and I said, ‘Dietary supplements.’ He said, ‘I love and appreciate the DS industry, and my people will be talking to yours soon.’ Since then and most recently, I’ve been helping to connect our trade association leadership with RFK’s people to assemble a needs list for our industry from the FDA.”

Sudberg added, “The list is growing long but if we are able to get only a few of them done, our industry will be paying RFK gratitude and may take back the stupid mainstream media narrative they’ve all said about the guy.”

Bill Moses, an investor and entrepreneur in the food and beverage industry, said in an interview that he’s friends with Kennedy and has been close to him for over a decade. Based on public and private conversations, Kennedy supports the supplement and natural products industry, Moses said.

SupplySide Supplement Journal was unable to obtain a comment directly from Kennedy about his views on the role of dietary supplements in promoting health.

“For the first time, as long as I can remember, we have someone in HHS who believes in the value of the commodity,” said Dan Fabricant, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Natural Products Association (NPA) and a former FDA official who oversaw the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs. “I think those are very good signs. What that means operationally remains to be seen.”

Based on public health and regulations of supplements, Fabricant acknowledged in an interview that the Commissioner of FDA will be “further down in the weeds than” the head of HHS, though he noted the HHS “secretary can certainly guide the general direction of FDA.”

Trump hasn’t nominated an FDA commissioner to replace the physician Robert Califf, who has led FDA since February 2022 and also served in the same job from February 2016 until January 2017.

During the 17th annual meeting of Friends of Cancer Research, Ramsey Baghdadi — co-founder of Prevision Policy, which provides breaking analysis for the biopharma business— asked Califf about concerns that FDA could be the subject of “political interference from the White House or HHS over actual approval decisions.”

While noting FDA is part of a hierarchy in the executive branch under HHS and the president, Califf responded, “The tradition in 99.95 percent of FDA decisions about individual products is that those decisions are made by career civil servants.

“The commissioner actually has no role in that unless there’s an internal dissent and an appeal, or in some cases, an external appeal that makes it all the way up to the commissioner level,” Califf explained. “But it’s totally within the law for the president or the HHS Secretary to overrule the entire FDA. So that could happen. Did it happen to me? No.”

In recent years, an HHS decision that conflicted with FDA’s views had an impact on the dietary supplement industry. In 2018, HHS rescinded a request for DEA to classify two constituents of the botanical kratom as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

In a 2018 letter to then-DEA Acting Administrator Uttam Dhillon, the then-Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Brett Giroir, recommended two constituents of kratom, mitragynine and 7-hydroxmitragynine, not be controlled either temporarily or permanently until such action is supported by scientific research.

“This decision is based on many factors, in part on new data, and in part on the relative lack of evidence, combined with an unknown and potentially substantial risk to public health if these chemicals were scheduled at this time,” Giroir wrote. According to kratom advocates, FDA has been waging war on the botanical for years, disregarding the current science.

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Prominent critics of the dietary supplement sector aren’t keen on Kennedy leading HHS.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not remotely qualified for the role and should be nowhere near the science-based agencies that safeguard our nutrition, food safety and health,” Peter Lurie, M.D., executive director and president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), said in a statement. “Nominating an anti-vaxxer like Kennedy to HHS is like putting a flat-earther at the head of NASA. CSPI opposes this nomination and any other nominees who are a direct threat to science and evidence-based solutions.”

Lurie, who previously served as associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis at FDA, added, “If unassuming little viruses could talk, measles, mumps and rubella would be loudly cheerleading for the nomination of this prolific spreader of scientific misinformation.”

S. Bryn Austin is the director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED), which has lobbied states to restrict minors’ access to supplements marketed for weight loss and muscle building. She also is a professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.

On Nov. 11, Austin and Amanda Raffoul, an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and affiliated faculty with STRIPED, co-authored a column published by STAT featuring the headline, “A new Trump administration will further loosen already-lax rules on supplements.”

“Many businesses operating in the health space are leery of Kennedy’s potential influence in a Trump administration, but there’s one that is likely gleeful about the prospects of a free pass from the feds: dietary supplements,” Austin and Raffoul wrote in the column for STAT, produced by Boston Globe Media. “This concerns us because the dangers of dietary supplements, particularly those sold with false claims for weight loss and muscle building, are clear.”

The authors described the supplement industry as “wealthy and ruthless” and also wrote, "In the absence of meaningful regulation from the FDA, the supplement industry will no doubt take Kennedy’s stance as a free pass to relentlessly promote its deceptive and predatory products."

On Nov. 16, during the “Journal Editorial Report” on Fox News, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor and Vice President Paul Gigot asked WSJ columnist Kimberly Strassel about some of Trump’s cabinet picks, including Kennedy, that are “roiling Washington and setting up some potentially fierce confirmation battles on Capitol Hill.”

“Kim, talk about RFK Jr., former Democrat, for HHS,” Gigot said on the news program. “The president says he’s going to make America healthy again, but he has some very controversial views that aren’t always based on scientific evidence.”

Strassel noted Kennedy “has a lot of conspiracy theories about things that make Americans unwell,” though he has sought to reassure Americans that he doesn’t intend to remove vaccines from the U.S. market. In the interview with NBC News, Kennedy asserted, “I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines. I’ve never been anti-vaccine.”

Strassel, however, suggested that Kennedy’s philosophy is strangely at odds with Trump’s policy of less — not more — government.

“But look, by and large … his goal is to crack down on outside players: drug makers, food producers, farmers, for instance,” the Wall Street Journal columnist said. “He doesn’t like certain large-scale farming practices, pesticides, etc. This is growing government, Paul. It’s about more regulation. It’s not about less. And that’s where I see the difficulty of this appointment because Donald Trump wants to get government out of lives.”

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Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS is welcomed by the wellness industry, according to Rick Collins, a criminal defense lawyer and expert on sports nutrition and dietary supplements.

“The wellness and fitness industry is excited about a reversal of FDA’s 40-year crusade against dietary supplements,” Collins told SupplySide Supplement Journal. “Most of the 70% of Americans who believe in healthy supplements are on board. Of course, there will be critics. Anti-supplement activist groups will ring alarm bells at the prospect of change. That’s expected. Belgian philosopher and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, ‘Each innovative spirit is opposed by a thousand minds appointed to guard the past.’ But improving the state of America’s health demands a new direction.”

United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA) President Loren Israelsen echoed the view from several dietary supplement insiders that Kennedy’s nomination is positive news for industry.

“Americans voted for change in this election. The nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. for secretary of HHS is what change looks like,” Israelsen said by email. “He has been clear in his views that Americans are not a healthy people, and the root causes are well known and must be addressed. What that means is peril for some and great promise for others. Our industry would fall into the great promise side of this equation.”

Israelsen added, “Our immediate task is to articulate an action plan that would advance the need for clean and healthy soil, proper nutrition for children, cleaner foods for all and addressing the root cause of diseases and associated massive health care costs of treatment over prevention. There will be contentious issues (as always), but should Mr. Kennedy be confirmed, let our industry work with RFK toward the common goal of better health and freedom of choice in health and wellness and a more sustainable and clean food production system.”

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It's still unclear whether — and to what extent — Kennedy and his team at HHS would have a hand in directly influencing dietary supplement policies, regulations or enforcement against bad actors at FDA.

He told NBC News that Trump wants him “to do three things.”

“One, clean up the corruption at the agencies, particularly the conflicts of interests that have turned those agencies into captive agencies for the pharmaceutical industry and the … food industry, the other industries, that they’re supposed to be regulating,” Kennedy said. “Number two, to return those agencies to the gold standard science, the empirically based, evidence-based medicine that they were famous for when I was a kid. And number three, to make America healthy again, to end the chronic disease epidemic, and President Trump has told me that he wants to see measurable concrete results within two years and in terms of a measurable diminishment in chronic disease among America’s kids.”

Asked whether Kennedy would ax “top-level federal service workers” at FDA, the lawyer responded, “In some categories, … there are entire departments like the nutrition department at FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids. Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients, and you go to Canada, and it’s got two or three.”

On Nov. 17, Trump, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and Kennedy were photographed sitting with trays of McDonald’s, with House Speaker Mike Johnson standing behind them.

“Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW,” Trump Jr. said on X.