Sarah Gonzalez

How companies can get their supplements onto store shelves without proving that they're even reasonably expected to be safe.

It involves glowing jellyfish.

This was in the 90s.

The young man was named Mark Underwood, and he had an idea for a new supplement that would improve memory.

And the story goes that the idea came from this moment with his mom who had MS, multiple sclerosis.

Diane, the mom, apparently tells her son about this.

Don't they, like, famously not have brains?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and he's not going to use jellyfish from like the ocean for this, okay?

He wants to use something that mimics the protein found in glowing jellyfish.

Because they have to be glowing.

So this is a synthetic, made-in-a-lab version of the protein that causes jellyfish to glow, okay?

And he sets out to now sell that product.

And on his marketing material, he promises his supplement will, quote, not cause any glowing.

Wow.

So it will not make you glow, but it will apparently improve your memory.

So what does it take for him to get that into stores or sell it online?

Well, the jellyfish company first went to the FDA, but the FDA was like...

Yeah, no, it doesn't meet our safety threshold, which is honestly a pretty low threshold.

But there is a way around that pesky little FDA objection.