The majority of American adults take dietary supplements, and the $20.5 billion-a-year market for these products continues to grow. In the U.S., dietary supplements are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as food, not as drugs, and do not require approval or safety testing before they enter the marketplace.
That is why Congress called on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Dietary Supplements to create the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) for capturing and tracking the growing number of supplements and to help understand the constantly evolving landscape, product ingredients, and claims.
The DSLD brings all information printed on individual product labels into a single, searchable database, making it easier for researchers and others to find information they need to make informed decisions. For example, researchers can use the DSLD to inform studies on nutrients and supplements, while health care providers can better understand products their patients take. And consumers can learn more about supplements and their ingredients by searching for information in the DSLD.
Abt developed the original database prototype for NIH in 2008, and the DSLD went live in 2013. When it was initially launched, the database included just under 17,000 dietary supplement product labels. We refresh it monthly to include more products from the ever-expanding market. By early 2024, there were over 186,000 labels in the system, with nearly 2,000 new labels still being added each month.
Abt has supported DSLD modernization efforts in recent years to enhance the user experience, provide faster database searches, and enable better access to data. The DSLD now contains an updated directory of linked dietary supplement resources from federal agencies and other sources. We also made sure the database has an application programming interface (API) so that application developers and data scientists can directly access the dietary supplement label data. The modernized cloud-based platform is scalable to NIH’s future needs.
In addition to modernizing the web application, we have worked closely with NIH to broaden the way DSLD can be used in answering research questions. For example, in 2022, we started routine web-scraping of data from mega-retailers like Amazon and Walmart to identify in real time best-selling dietary supplements and maintain a record for investigation into specific research questions. The scraping helps NIH prioritize supplements to enter into the DSLD, plus gain insight on the types of ingredients (and their amounts) in consistently best-selling products across popular categories.
Abt’s data scientists assist NIH in publishing dietary supplement research and in increasing the interoperability of DSLD with other federal data sources to streamline research and analysis across the government.
With Abt’s support, the Office of Dietary Supplements closely monitors the use of the DSLD to identify and roll out new features and site enhancements. The number of DSLD users nearly doubled after the launch of the updated website in 2021. The API receives nearly 4.5 million hits each month (requests for individual labels or searches count as a “hit”), indicating that users access DSLD routinely and consistently. And as of April 2024, more than 200 publications have referenced or cited DSLD.
We also know that other federal agencies use the DSLD regularly. For example, the DSLD helps the U.S. Department of Defense determine if product labels list any ingredients that might positively or negatively affect the health and performance of service members. The DSLD assists the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in reviewing ingredients and the multitude of claims listed on product labels. And it helps guide the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ongoing efforts to analyze how actual levels of ingredients found in common supplement types compare with levels printed on labels by manufacturers. DSLD is also used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to understand the supplements that U.S. citizens report consuming in national-level dietary intake surveys.
We have learned several lessons about how the DSLD can expand its value to users. By attending monthly federal workgroup meetings, Abt gains valuable insight into ways we can enhance the reach and impact of DSLD as a leading federal research tool. And, by regularly monitoring user inquiries and conducting user interviews, we learn about the various ways that researchers and the public use DSLD. The resulting insights inform the implementation of site enhancements.
Given the rapid pace of change in the dietary supplement market, continued updates and enhancements to the DLSD are imperative to expand its reach and value. It’s how DSLD can achieve its goal: being a recognized and valued resource to make information readily available to those who need it, when they need it.