The Role of Quality Assurance and Standardization in the Safety of Botanical Dietary Supplements

摘要

The importance of complementary and alternative therapies such as botanical dietary supplements continues to increase throughout the world((1). The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that the majority of people in developing countries depend on traditional and herbal medicines as their primary source of health care (2). In the United States, 42% of the population has reported using complementary and alternative medicines, especially botanical dietary supplements (3), costing an estimated 5.1 billion per year (4) . The marketing and use of dietary supplements have grown rapidly in the United States following the passage of the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act in 1994, which exempts dietary supplements from regulation as drugs, providing that they are not marketed for the diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of disease (5).