Banning Diet Supplements Won't Stop Teen Eating Disorders
Dietary supplement bans for minors may spread—but they’ll be costly, confusing, and ineffective.
Last year, New York became the first state to ban the sale of dietary and muscle-building supplements to minors. Despite ongoing implementation hurdles and legal challenges, several states—including Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington—have followed suit by introducing and advancing similar legislation in 2025.
New York's ban, which was passed under the guise of protecting minors from adverse health effects and eating disorders, requires retailers to verify a consumer is over the age of 18 before selling over-the-counter diet pills and dietary supplements for weight loss and muscle-building. Such supplements are defined as products "labeled, marketed, or otherwise represented for the purpose of achieving weight loss or muscle building." They include creatine, green tea extract, steroids, and raspberry ketone (a metabolism booster). Additional products encompass ones that state or imply they will help maintain or reduce body weight or increase strength and metabolism. Protein powders, drinks, and foods are not subject unless they contain ingredients that "would, considered alone, constitute a dietary supplement for weight loss or muscle building."
Beyond a manufacturer's intended marketing, a retailer's product placement among other dietary supplements must also be considered. This means a product's location in a retail store could serve as the kind of marketing necessary to deem a product a dietary supplement and therefore banned from sale to a minor.
Figuring out exactly which products are covered under this broad definition is up to the seller. Failure to comply can result in a court order from the attorney general to prohibit further violations and civil penalties of $500 per infraction.
New York's ban is supported by the Harvard University-based Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED). S. Bryn Austin, a professor of social and behavioral health at Harvard University and the founding director of STRIPED, argues that since many dietary supplements do not need approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before hitting shelves, states should make purchasing these products more difficult. (The agency only regulates a supplement that "presents a significant or unreasonable risk of illness.") By doing so, Austin posits, state agencies can send a message through restrictions about the link between these supplements and adverse health outcomes and eating disorders.
However, a recent review of the link between eating disorders and dietary supplements conducted in response to the STRIPED initiative found that the evidence "does not support a causative role for dietary supplements in eating disorders." Instead, the study found that potential links between the use of these products and a later eating order diagnosis "appear to be more of a symptom or associated behavior potentially valuable as a screening tool as opposed to demonstrating causality." In other words, dietary supplements don't cause eating disorders but rather may be abused by those who already have one. In this way, dietary supplements could be compared to exercise or eating salads.
Although the current regulatory push is aimed at consumers under the age of 18, adult consumers will undoubtedly feel the negative downstream consequences of such overbearing and misguided restrictions. While many are right to question the efficacy of the FDA, enacting more vague and confusing regulations like New York's will only introduce greater confusion and further incentivize Americans to rely on the imperfect state-led approval system for products.
