Time for a litigation supplement?

In the UK, the “nutritional supplement” and vitamin industry is big business—currently worth around £400m a year. One factor facilitating this growth is a regulatory environment that allows companies to promote their products in flagrant breach of labelling and advertising rules, with little risk of significant penalty or large scale consumer litigation.

As a result, the UK consumer is left exposed to the misleading claims of some manufacturers who promote their “health” products with labelling fictions that have little to do with the product inside the packaging. On the whole, the risk for consumers of vitamins and supplements is not one of personal injury per se, but rather that they purchase expensive products on the basis of fraudulent labelling claims. Within this context it is vital that manufacturers are compelled to either substantiate their products’ claims to medical efficacy, or remove them: under the current regulatory system in the UK this is not happening.

At the end of August,