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Legal Update: Nutraceuticals, functional foods and CBD

Legal analyst Eric Greenberg discusses marketing terms not recognized by the FDA, and CBD gets its first round of warning letters.

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Eric Greenberg

Nutraceuticals.  “There’s no such thing as nutraceuticals, not legally,” says Eric Greenberg, legal contributor to Packaging World Magazine.

“It’s not a recognized term from the Food and Drug Administration’s point of view because the agency recognizes only “dietary supplements,” which are products taken by mouth and intended to supplement one’s intake of this or that—Vitamin C, for instance, says Greenberg. 

Dietary supplements are a subset of the food category, the rest are referred to as “traditional” foods or beverages.

The source of much confusion, according to Greenberg, is the fact that both dietary supplements and traditional foods are permitted by law to make claims on their labels of effects on the structure and function of the body, as drugs are.   In rare instances food or supplement manufacturers can make claims about reducing the risk of some diseases, as one commonly thinks of drugs as doing.

How a product is regulated depends primarily on what type of product FDA thinks it is, and the term “nutraceutical” has no legal meaning as such.

Functional Foods is a marketing term that usually refers to a subset of nutraceuticals. It is intended, Greenberg says, to refer to foods or beverages in traditional form, as opposed to being tablets or liquids intended as and labeled as dietary supplements, but which tout their health and wellness benefits, thus serving a function.

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