When Selling Hope Becomes a Business Model
Vitamins, supplements, and the public duty to demand proof
By George Skouras · October 11, 2026
A person worried about failing memory, chronic illness, or the health of a child should not have to become a laboratory scientist, a trial lawyer, and a regulatory investigator before buying a bottle from a pharmacy shelf. Yet the polished packaging and confident promises of the supplements marketplace can leave the most important question unanswered: what has actually been proved?
My new book, On the Failure of the Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, examines how we arrived at this condition. Its subtitle states the scope: Vitamins, Supplements, the FDA, and the Law, 1960–2026: A History of Regulation, Deception, and Public Responsibility. The book grew from my law-review article into a sustained examination of scientific evidence, commercial persuasion, legislative choices, enforcement, and the moral obligations of corporate enterprise.
The argument begins with a distinction that must remain clear. Vitamins are essential to human life. Supplementation can serve legitimate nutritional and medical needs. Those facts do not establish that every additional dose, every formulation, or every advertised benefit improves the health of the person being persuaded to buy it. The essential character of a nutrient cannot be borrowed as proof for a seller's promise.
Where that borrowing becomes knowing deception, polite language can conceal the character of the conduct. The modern snake-oil peddler may operate through an e-commerce platform, a celebrity endorsement, or an influencer's reassuring video. The moral transaction remains recognizable: another person's fear becomes an opportunity to extract money through a promise the seller cannot justify. Illness is not a license to sell false hope.
Congress built the framework
The present system did not appear overnight. My book begins with the vitamin controversies of the 1960s, follows the battles over potency and consumer access in the 1970s, and examines the political and commercial developments that led to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.
DSHEA supplied a durable regulatory settlement. Dietary supplements generally enter the market without the FDA preapproval for safety and effectiveness associated with drugs. Manufacturers retain legal responsibilities, and FDA retains enforcement powers. But the timing matters: products and promises can reach consumers before a government assessment of the evidence. FDA's explanation makes that distinction explicit.
Congress must answer for the arrangement it created. A legislature cannot design the allocation of proof and authority, then speak as though the resulting difficulties belong exclusively to administrators. Agencies must account for how they use their powers. Legislators must account for the powers they grant, restrict, or leave inadequate.
Industry lobbying and organized resistance to stronger oversight belong in this history. They should be examined through records and evidence. Political influence is a serious subject; an accusation of bribery requires its own proof. An argument for accountability gains force when it identifies responsibility precisely.
The promise must answer to the evidence
An accurately manufactured capsule can still be sold through a misleading claim. A laboratory result can be scientifically interesting without establishing a clinical benefit. Evidence concerning one ingredient, dose, or population may fail to support the promise made for a different finished product and a different buyer.
This is why the book asks a demanding question: does the evidence support what the consumer is being invited to believe?
The consumer receives a complete message. Product names, photographs, testimonials, medical imagery, and confident narration work together. A qualification in small print may do little to correct the impression created by the rest of the advertisement. The FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance addresses that overall impression and the need for scientific substantiation.
The law should demand a correspondence between the claim and its support. Sellers who profit from a health promise should be able to explain what evidence supports it, for whom, at what dose, and with what limitations. When the advertising speaks with certainty that the evidence does not possess, consumers are being asked to purchase confidence manufactured by marketing.
Enforcement must reach the profits
The FTC has brought meaningful enforcement actions. My criticism recognizes that record. It also asks whether intervention arrives early enough, whether consumers recover their losses, and whether the consequences make repeated deception an unattractive business strategy.
In AMG Capital Management v. FTC, the Supreme Court held that Section 13(b) did not authorize the monetary relief the Commission had sought through that provision. The decision did not abolish every route to consumer recovery. It exposed a consequential limitation in a widely used enforcement mechanism. Congress is responsible for supplying a clear statutory foundation for the remedies it expects the agency to obtain.
An order to stop an advertisement does not, by itself, return the money consumers spent. A consequence too small to alter the offender's calculation may become another expense of doing business. Consumer protection must therefore examine the economic result of wrongdoing as well as the language of the next advertisement.
Responsibility must reach the decision makers
Corporate enterprise acts through human decisions. Executives authorize campaigns, approve expenditures, respond to warnings, and decide whether to correct or conceal a problem. Where evidence establishes knowing participation in serious misconduct, responsibility should reach those decisions and the people who made them.
My book proposes the Dietary Supplement Truth, Safety, and Corporate Accountability Act. This is my proposed legislation, not an enacted law. It would combine public product registration and traceability with accessible evidence summaries, scrutiny of consequential health claims, stronger consumer recovery, and accountability for commercial promotion through influencers and affiliates.
It would also authorize escalating consequences for established misconduct: restitution, appropriate civil and criminal penalties, executive bans, and, in narrowly defined cases, judicial receivership or supervised dissolution. An enterprise sustained by knowing deception should face the possibility that it will lose the privilege of continuing that enterprise.
Severity requires proof. The proposal protects good-faith scientific disagreement and rejects liability based on shareholder ownership or employment alone. Dissolution would require demanding findings and consideration of lesser remedies. Consumers deserve protection, and accused persons remain entitled to due process. Both obligations belong to a credible system of law.
Public responsibility cannot be postponed
Freedom of choice requires information that deserves trust. A consumer does not become meaningfully informed merely because a transaction is voluntary or a disclaimer appears somewhere on the label. Nor can public institutions discharge their responsibility by waiting indefinitely for vulnerable people to uncover what commercial actors should already know.
The question reaches beyond vitamins and supplements. It concerns the conditions under which private economic power deserves public legitimacy. Profit cannot supply its own moral justification. When an enterprise derives its revenue from materially misleading health promises, the law must reach the conduct, the gains, and the responsible decision makers.
I wrote this book because the gap between promise and proof has consequences for real people. Honest manufacturers deserve a marketplace in which evidence has value. Consumers deserve remedies that restore what can be restored. Those who knowingly exploit sickness and fear deserve consequences strong enough to change the calculation.
The time for gentle correction has passed. The time for accounting has arrived.
On the Failure of the Congress and the Federal Trade Commission is available in paperback and Kindle. Read the book overview and the original article overview.