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New Jersey is considering a ban on sales of diet pills to minors under age 18, with support from health researchers and patients who have suffered from eating disorders.
The proposed bill would ban the sale of weight loss or muscle building pills and supplements to people under age 18, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. The ban would be enforced by fining the seller up to $750, and would cover online sales as well. The bill passed the New Jersey General Assembly in October, and has been referred to a Senate committee.
Similar laws went into effect in New York and Colorado earlier this year. The supplement industry is pushing back against such legislation, arguing that most of their products are safe and that there is no evidence linking supplements to eating disorders.
Dietary supplements are not sufficiently regulated in the United States, which lead to cases where they contain drugs not listed on the label, said Bryn Austin, a public health researcher at Harvard University. She has advocated for the legislation in New York and New Jersey.
“There is no federal prescreening of dietary supplements before they go to the market for safety or effectiveness,” she said. “What this means is that American consumers are basically the lab rats of this industry.”
Austin also directs the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, based out of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children’s Hospital.
In 2019, she co-authored a study that looked at years of federal data. Her study found that diet pills, compared to vitamins, are almost three times more risky for children, sending children to the hospital, and in some cases, leading to disabilities. In another study published in 2020, she found that young women who use diet pills or laxatives to control their weight are several times more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder, compared to women who did not use such pills.
“We can put an end to that, just like we’ve done with other harmful products like tobacco, alcohol, pseudoephedrine,” she said. “We don’t sell these products to children. So why sell them diet pills?”
Austin began her advocacy in New Jersey several years ago when Alexandra Xu, who was then in high school, contacted her. Xu, who is now a junior at Rice University studying psychology, suffered from an eating disorder for several years. Xu said she developed an eating disorder after she changed her diet to heal more quickly from a forearm injury due to playing too much piano, and that became an obsession with “clean eating” — a hyper focus on healthy foods.
“I kept finding … something that was so called ‘unhealthy’ about almost every food,” she said. “I would tell my friends at the time that the reason why I had such … strict dietary rules is I had allergies or sensitivity to gluten and dairy … that was kind of the way my eating disorder concealed itself.”
Her doctor diagnosed her with anorexia, and referred her to a therapist and dietician. She later became an advocate for Project HEAL, a nonprofit focused on preventing and helping people recover from eating disorders.
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