Project Number: 1235-52000-052-00
Project Type: Appropriated

Start Date: Feb 20, 2004
End Date: Feb 19, 2009

Objective:
To acquire and develop representative and accurate compositional values for nutrients and other nutritional components in dietary supplements. To develop a generic data documentation and evaluation system to assess the quality of data for nutritional supplements, to provide for the continuous monitoring of dietary supplement composition data, to establish guidelines for the generation and dissemination of high quality data.

Approach:
This project will develop and implement an expert system to evaluate the quality and representativeness of existing estimates for specific nutrients in nutritional supplements. Priorities for new nutrient analyses will be identified and ranked for those supplements which contribute up to 80% of the intake of specific nutrients for a representative sample of the U.S. population. Where nutrient data are inadequate for high priority dietary supplements, new values will be generated by analytical determination, calculation, or consultation with the dietary supplement industry. Samples of supplements to be analyzed will be selected using a probability-based approach and nationwide sampling. Valid chemical methods including rigorous analytical quality control will be employed. Effective modes of data dissemination will be developed to address the needs of data users.