MAHA is not a movement about deregulation for its own sake. It is about restoring trust by ensuring people understand what is in their food and what they put into their bodies. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly emphasized, consumers cannot exercise meaningful choice without access to clear, reliable information. Mandatory product listing advances that principle by making the supplement marketplace visible—not controlled.
Visibility is not micromanagement. It is infrastructure.
When regulatory systems fail, they rarely fail with a bang. They fail quietly.
Consider this highly probable scenario: A handful of adverse event reports arrive at the FDA from different states. Healthy adults. Similar symptoms. Each consumed a dietary supplement purchased online. The products appear unrelated—different brands, different labels, different distributors. No obvious common denominator.
Inside the agency, staff use every tool Fabricant claims is sufficient. They search public databases. They consult voluntary label repositories. They scrape e-commerce platforms that change faster than regulators can track. They call retailers who can confirm what they sell, but that doesn’t capture the products sold on obscure websites.
And then comes the moment no regulator wants to reach.
The FDA cannot quickly determine how many products contain the suspect ingredient, which companies are responsible or how widely those products were distributed. Not because the agency lacks authority—but because it lacks a basic map of the marketplace.
At a press briefing days later, an FDA spokesperson is forced to say: “At this time, we do not have a comprehensive list of affected products.”
That sentence does more damage than any recall notice. Consumers hear uncertainty. Retailers hear liability and pull entire categories. Responsible companies are swept up alongside bad actors because the system cannot distinguish them in real time.
This is not a failure of enforcement. It is a failure of visibility.
In his column, Fabricant portrays MPL as a backdoor to premarket approval. But that confuses notification with permission. A listing requirement that simply informs regulators what products are already on the market is not approval—it is basic regulatory infrastructure. Properly drafted legislation can—and repeatedly has—explicitly prohibit FDA from delaying, rejecting or conditioning market entry. As I have previously emphasized, MPL must function like a birth certificate, not a driver’s license.
DSHEA’s post-market framework remains intact. What changes is the agency’s ability to act faster, more precisely and more fairly once problems arise.
This distinction matters because the costs of opacity are not theoretical.
Japan’s recent red yeast rice (beni-koji) crisis revealed the same structural weakness that exists in the United States. Supplements containing the ingredient—produced by a single manufacturer and incorporated into numerous downstream products sold under different brand names—were linked to serious illnesses and deaths. Regulators struggled to identify the full scope of affected products because no comprehensive, up-to-date product inventory existed.
The result was cascading recalls, retailer overreaction, public confusion and a rapid erosion of trust. The issue was not regulatory power. It was regulatory visibility.
A product registry would not have prevented contamination. It would not have guaranteed safety. But it would have allowed regulators to identify affected products in hours instead of weeks, issue precise warnings instead of sweeping alerts, and avoid punishing compliant companies by association.
That lesson applies directly to the U.S. supplement market.
Fabricant insists FDA is not “in the dark” because supplements are sold openly and labels exist in voluntary databases. But voluntary, incomplete and outdated repositories are not transparency. Physical shelves, partial datasets and ad-hoc scraping cannot keep pace with a market that now includes private-label churn, rapid reformulations, influencer-driven launches and global e-commerce.
FDA itself has acknowledged this gap repeatedly. It does not know how many supplements are on the market, how many products contain a given ingredient or when new products are introduced. That is not a philosophical problem—it is an operational one.
A mandatory registry directly addresses this gap without expanding FDA’s substantive authority.
Opponents argue that a registry will not stop bad actors. That is true—and irrelevant. Bad actors already ignore the law. The real question is who pays the price for that noncompliance. Under the current system, consumers, retailers and responsible companies absorb the damage because regulators lack an easy, enforceable way to separate legitimate actors from those operating in the shadows.
A registry creates a straightforward administrative requirement that is easy to enforce: Failure to list equals misbranding. There’s no lab testing requirement. No chain-of-custody hurdle. No years of litigation. Registration equals compliance.
And, in truth, it doesn’t require robust enforcement from FDA to have value. Retailers can enforce it themselves by simply refusing to sell products that aren’t listed. It becomes self-executing to reduce the availability of fly-by-night products.
Fabricant also warns that a mandatory registry will chill innovation and empower FDA to target ingredients through mechanisms like drug preclusion. But recent history demonstrates the opposite dynamic. When regulators and platforms lack authoritative information, they act broadly and defensively. Entire categories are pulled. Lawful products disappear overnight. Small companies suffer first.
Transparency stabilizes markets. Ambiguity destabilizes them.
A registry does not resolve legal disputes over ingredient status—but it creates a shared factual baseline that allows those disputes to be addressed through established legal processes rather than rumor, fear and platform overreaction.
Concerns about small-business burden deserve serious attention—but again, this is a question of design, not principle. Industry experience with voluntary systems like the Supplement OWL demonstrates that companies of all sizes can comply efficiently when requirements are limited to label-based information. Compared to adverse event reporting or cGMP compliance—both widely supported—product listing is modest.
More importantly, opacity imposes far greater costs on small businesses. When retailers pull entire categories because regulators cannot quickly identify affected products, it is smaller brands that lack legal teams, cash reserves and platform leverage that disappear first.
Finally, Fabricant argues that MPL will fuel litigation. But plaintiffs’ attorneys already find labels through Google, Amazon and store shelves. A registry does not create legal risk; it accelerates access to information that already exists. What it does add is accountability—and accountability is not anti-industry. It is how trust is sustained.
This is where MAHA matters most.
MAHA is about empowering consumers with knowledge, not leaving them to navigate opaque systems. It is about transparency in what people consume, not blind faith that someone, somewhere, has it under control. A visible, comprehensive supplement listing reinforces that ethos by ensuring that products sold to Americans are identifiable, traceable and accountable.
When the FDA has to say, “we don’t know,” consumers lose confidence, retailers overreact, lawmakers lose patience and responsible companies pay the price. Trust erodes faster than it can be rebuilt.
Mandatory product listing is not premarket approval. It is not an endorsement of safety. It is not a cure-all.
It is a spotlight. It illuminates a murky marketplace. It allows responsible companies—whether large or small—to thrive while insisting less reputable players be visible and accountable to their regulator.
And for a movement built on the idea that Americans deserve to understand what they put into their bodies, insisting that regulators operate in the dark is not pro-MAHA. It is the very condition MAHA exists to fix.
