Speaking with NutraIngredients-USA at the recent SupplySide West show in Las Vegas, Adam Ismail, executive director of the Global Organization for EPA and DHA Omega-3s (GOED), explained the association’s development of this new education campaign.
“A few years ago we had the omega-3 coalition campaign when a bunch of companies came together to fund an advertising campaign in the US with the goal to reverse the decline in consumption of omega-3 supplements,” explained Ismail. “It was successful but we couldn’t get funding to continue. It’s expensive to run a national advertising campaign, so a small group of companies said they were still interested in funding long-term objectives and trying to grow consumption of omega-3s so is there another way of doing that?
“We said we should target the influencers of consumers. We know from the consumer work we do that in almost every country in the world doctors are the most influential source of omega-3 purchases on a consumer. So we started looking at what can do to educate doctors and the first thing we need to do is to study the baseline: What are doctors’ attitudes and awareness of omega-3 benefits?
“What we’ve identified is the biggest opportunity is to educate providers in the primary care environment, so that includes family practitioners, GPs, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists. We’re in the research stages now but the goal is to develop an education campaign around that.”
Where are we with the qualified health claim for blood pressure?
NutraIngredients-USA also asked about progress with the association’s blood pressure-related qualified health claim petition.
“The FDA just recently asked for another extension,” said Ismail. “There have been other qualified health claim petitions that have gone through that were submitted after ours and approved faster than ours. When we talked to the FDA, part of it is that our petition is a lot more complex than the other ones because there are so many more studies to go through. We have a meta-analysis that we funded to support the claim, but FDA actually looks at each individual studies that go into the meta-analysis and it was a big meta-analysis.
“It’s a big task for FDA, and we’re still optimistic.”
GOED Exchange 2018
These topics and more will be discussed at the upcoming GOED Exchange, February 6-8, 2018 in Seattle. For more information and to register, please click HERE.