Harkin also cosponsored a bill in the 1990s, along with two-thirds of the Senate, now a law, that removed supplements—not just vitamins but herbs and other botanicals, hormones, natural whatever—from regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. The author of the law was Orrin Hatch, the Republican senior senator from Utah; not coincidentally, America’s nutritional supplement industry is concentrated in Utah, where Mormons are also concentrated. When federal deregulation was enacted in the 1990s, Americans were buying $9 billion worth of supplements a year; today they spend around $40
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