Industry Forms Dietary Supplement Education Alliance 29472Industry Forms Dietary Supplement Education Alliance

Industry Forms Dietary Supplement Education Alliance

WASHINGTON--For quite a while, the dietary supplement industry has beensaying that the "E" in DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health andEducation Act) has been ignored. However, an industry-formed group has beencreated, called the Dietary Supplement Education Alliance (DSEA), consisting ofsuch industry organizations as the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA),the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA) and the American BotanicalCouncil (ABC), as well as trade publishers including Virgo Publishing and NewHope Natural Media. DSEA also consists of the manufacturer-based group, theCorporate Alliance for Integrative Medicine (CAIM), which hosts such companiesas Natrol, Weider, Rexall Sundown and Twin Laboratories.The focus of DSEA is to form a proactive, and not just reactive, publicrelations service initiative, according to Elliott Balbert, president of Natroland acting-president of DSEA. "The media has not been very friendly to thenatural products industry, and as a result of that, it has gone from bad toworse to pretty ugly," he said.DSEA started when CAIM allocated $300,000 last year to begin this publicrelations initiative, and Balbert, as part of CAIM, volunteered to spearhead theproject. As the word spread about DSEA's goals, groups such as AHPA and ABCjoined. DSEA has been working with Hill and Knowlton Inc. (www.hillandknowlton.com),a public relations firm that has past experience with food and nutrition issues.