The enforcement wire · weekly · free

The letters, and the wording that drew them.

Every week we sweep the FDA's warning letters, the FTC's actions and the NAD's decisions for anything touching supplement marketing claims. Plenty of people publish that a letter went out. Where the published document quotes the company’s own marketing, we quote it back to you, along with which of the nineteen rulebooks it runs into. Roughly a third of documents do. The rest we link and say plainly that no wording was quoted. The letter is not the useful part. The wording is.

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What is in it

  • The letters and actions themselves, from the FDA, the FTC and the NAD, filtered to the ones that touch supplement marketing claims rather than manufacturing or labelling mechanics.
  • The wording, where the document contains it. What the company actually published, quoted from the public document. Not every letter quotes marketing: a facility letter quotes inspection notes instead. When there is nothing to quote we say so and link the document rather than padding the issue.
  • The rulebook it runs into, named, out of the thirteen we work from, so you can go and read the rule rather than take our word for it.
  • No pitch. The wire is the product, not an ad dressed as a newsletter. If we ever have something to say about your copy specifically, it comes in a separate message you can ignore.

Why the phrase and not the letter

A warning letter is a public document that a dozen newsletters will tell you exists. Knowing that a company was written to is not actionable. Knowing that the sentence which drew it was "clinically proven to reduce inflammation", and that the same construction sits in your own bullet three, is actionable this afternoon. We can do it because we already hold the standards mapped to the rulebooks, which is the same machinery behind the audit.

What this is not

It is not legal advice, and it is not a prediction. We report what a regulator or a self-regulatory body has already published. We never say enforcement is coming, because nobody knows that, and telling you otherwise to sell you something would be the kind of claim we charge people to find in their own copy.

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