The 1938 Food Drug and Cosmetic Act Laid the Foundation for Drug Regulation

The 1938 Food Drug and Cosmetic Act set the groundwork for our modern day regulation of food drugs and cosmetics. If you want to introduce a new molecular entity, a drug into the market, it has to go through this extremely rigorous process of evaluation before it can be even tried on humans. There was a parallel track of regulations for food, but importantly for our story, dietary supplements weren't really a category yet. And so understandably, this 1938 law didn't have very much to say about them.