抄録
There are a wide variety of foods that are generally recognized as “health foods”. Among them, dietary supplements (DSs), containing certain components in a concentrated tablet-, capsule- or powdered form, are a major concern for safety issues because this form permits people to take excess amounts and use them in place of medical drugs to treat diseases. However, as the new category of “Foods with Health Claims” was introduced in 2015, the market of DSs has been growing rapidly, and the rate of DS use is expected to increase. To ensure safety, the following actions are needed: 1) conduct post-marketing research on adverse events, 2) evaluate the causal relationship with methods suited to investigating health foods and 3) collect data on adverse events. This review first provides an overview of health foods, adverse events related to DSs, and the current system of collecting adverse event reports. Then, we will introduce our approach to actively collecting adverse event reports from consumers using a nationwide online survey. We believe online surveys are suitable for confirming the onset of adverse events as well as identifying any related product/ingredient; thus, this is expected to become a new measure to complement the current system to ensure safety of DSs.
