This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 27th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman aimed his powerful office at the producers

of dietary supplements, it initially seemed

that he'd uncovered a massive fraud. That is, until scientists told him that his evidence was fatally

flawed. Cato's Walter Olson discusses New York's assault on dietary

supplements. As you note in your city journal piece, supplements as a category have generally been fairly lightly regulated until recently.

So can you give us a little, just a little bit of a history of how supplements have been treated by the federal

government.

Nutritional supplements, which includes herbal supplements, have gotten a special light regime

of federal regulation and Senator Hatch, I think, was one of the original people responsible for telling the

FDA that they could not march in and regulate with his heavy hand as they did for pharmaceuticals and the luck.

And so there have been complaints over the years that there are marketing problems, for example, that there are There are loose claims made about the health effects of the health effects of herb supplements and that more recently there were worries in the literature

about whether or not they were being manufactured

so you were actually getting the intended supplements.

The federal government's light touch did not stop New York Attorney General

Eric Schneiderman to decide this the state of New York is going to look into what's in these supplements

on whether or not they pass muster. So what was the muster? He had them tested and

he found that supplements sold at major retailers, less than half of them,

contained any DNA from the plant that was advertised on the label.

And the suggestion clearly was, and this was picked up by the press from coast to coast,

suggestion was that this was fraud, that they had not put in the plant that they were claiming to be a supplement of.

...