Food supplements are:

• concentrated sources of nutrients or other substances with a nutritional or physiological effect
• a supplement to the normal diet
• marketed in dose form

DHI provides product safety assessments and assessments of nutritional or physiological effects as documentation for nutrition and health claims.

Safety assessments
Usually, health and safety assessments of food supplements will be based on known substances, plant or animal parts, additives, processing aids etc. in the product. We carry out literature searches in databases and reference libraries as the basis for our safety assessments.

If information on product composition is insufficient, we perform data searches to provide hints on possible product composition. The data searches may be supplemented by laboratory analyses.

Documentation and data gaps
A safety assessment includes a thorough examination of published scientific literature and other available documentation. In case of lack of documentation we can identify the data gaps and propose what can be done to provide sufficient data. We have profound experience in assessing the possibility of contaminations, propose actions to avoid contaminants, and we also propose limit values based on toxicological knowledge.

Regulatory compliance
A safety assessment from DHI is your guarantee that health and safety effects of a product have been assessed according to regulatory requirements and scientific principles. We also assist companies with documentation of products for other regulatory compliance issues, including notification of dietary supplements and safety assessment of ingredients to the competent authorities.