AVAILABLE DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS IN ARGENTINE, IN 2012

CABRAL PÉREZ M; BIRRI M; AGNESE AM

Córdoba

Congreso; Congreso Latinoamericano de Salud Pública. VIII Jornadas Internacionales de Salud Pública.; 2012

Des-regulation of food and medicine importations to the end of the ´90 generated the entrance to the country of a big amount of Dietary Supplements (DS). For this reason, by 74/98 MsyAS Resolution,  the article 1381 was incorporated to the Código Alimentario Argentino (CAA) regulating the subject. According to it, the producers, elaborators and fractionators must be registered and authorized by sanitary authority and  must register their products. The aims of this work were to determine the amount of registered DS and its composition, particularly those with herbs. For this, a transversal study was developed taking as unit of analysis the available registers in the data base of ANMAT. This presented 1851 registers distributed in 119 different combinations of ingredients. The majority were Vitamins (9.08%, IC95%: 7.77% - 10.39%), Herbs (7.94%, IC95%: 6.71% - 9.17%) Minerals/Vitamins (7.83%, IC95%: 6.61% - 9.05%), Aminoacids (6.59%, IC95%: 5.46% - 7.72%) and Carbohidrates/Proteins/Vitamins/Minerals (5.94%, IC95%: 4.86% - 7.02%).             The 36.09% (IC95%: 33.90% - 38.28%) of the products contained at least an herb in their composition. 42 plant species were accounted; the 22.60% (IC95%: 19.43% - 25.77%) of the products with the words herbs or herb extract without more data. The most frequent occured species were Ginseng (12.43%, IC95%: 9.93% - 14.93%), Soy bean (8.98%, IC95%: 6.81% - 11.15%), Grape (7.49%, IC95%: 5.49% - 9.40%), Ginkgo biloba (5.24%, IC95%: 3.55% - 6.93%) and Aloe vera (4.64%, IC95%: 3.04% - 6.24%). It is striking that herbs are not registered with the correct botanical name as normative ask for. Neither was mentioned the identity in the 22.60% of the products that contained them.