Federal Monitoring of Dietary Supplement Use in the Resident, Civilian, Noninstitutionalized US Population: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

This review summarizes the current and previous data on dietary supplement (DS) use collected from participants in the NHANES, describes the NHANES DS database used to compute nutrient intakes from DSs, discusses recent developments and future directions, and describes many examples to show the utility of these data in informing nutrition research and policy. Since 1971, NHANES has been collecting information on the use of DSs from participants. These data are critical to national nutrition surveillance and have been used to characterize usage patterns, examine trends over time, assess the percentage of the population meeting or exceeding nutrient recommendations, and help to elucidate the sources contributing nutrients to the diet of the US population. More than half of adults and approximately one-third of children in the United States currently use ≥1 DS in the course of 30 d. DSs contribute to the dietary intake of nutrients and bioactive compounds in the United States and therefore need to be assessed when monitoring nutritional status of the population and when studying diet-health associations. With the recent development and availability of the Dietary Supplement Label Database, a comprehensive DS database that will eventually contain labels for all products marketed in the United States, NHANES DS data will be more easily linked to product information to estimate nutrient intake from DSs. NHANES provides a rich source of nationally representative data on the usage of dietary supplements in the United States. Over time, NHANES has both expanded and improved collection methods. The continued understanding of sources of error in collection methods will continue to be explored and is critical to improved accuracy.