Nutrition 21 to aid IOM testing

Nutrition 21, the US producer of chromium picolinate products, has announced that it will provide data to the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) to help it assess the safety of the product.

The IOM announced last week that it was focusing on six dietary supplements which have been linked to potential health risks, including chromium picolinate.

Gail Montgomery, president and CEO of Nutrition 21​, said: "Since our company believes that the dietary supplement industry should be held to very high standards, we have already made a substantial investment in conducting toxicology studies and clinical research to support our product and label claims, and have sought third party confirmation of our findings.​

"Recently, after careful review of an extensive dossier of safety data that was compiled by ENVIRON, a pre-eminent science and regulatory consultant group, an independent panel of experts approved our Chromax chromium picolinate as generally recognised as safe for use in foods (GRAS)."​

She continued: "ENVIRON's stringent review process confirmed the findings of our earlier safety studies, which along with more than a decade of consumer experience, gives us confidence the IOM will reach the same conclusions. Additional government studies are welcome as we expect that they will dispel any remaining doubts as to the safety of chromium picolinate.​

"Once the safety profile has been confirmed by governmental regulatory experts, we believe the substantial body of evidence demonstrating chromium picolinate's ability to positively impact insulin sensitivity will result in wide scale adoption of its use as a safe, cost effective nutritional therapy for people with insulin resistance,"​ concluded Montgomery.

Insulin resistance, which results in poor blood sugar control, is thought to be an underlying problem in people with diabetes and obesity and has been observed as a metabolic problem in people with Syndrome X, a condition some health experts consider to be a pre-cursor to diabetes.