Sarah Gonzalez

There is a law from the food regulation world that supplement makers can take advantage of.

If you've heard our recent story on how untested chemicals sneak into our food, this might sound familiar.

But if you are a food maker and you've just invented a new chemical or a new ingredient that has never been used in food before, you can just declare.

that your own brand new ingredient is safe, that it's generally recognized as safe, or GRAS, G-R-A-S.

Melanie pointed to a supplement trade article that says industry lawyers even advise their clients to do this.

Like, you can skip that pesky FDA hurdle.

Just put your new ingredient in a food product first.

And now you can add it to your brand new supplement as a generally recognized as safe product.

Ta-da!

And that is exactly what the glowy jellyfish guy did.

Yeah, that safety self-certification allows them to bypass the FDA's review process.

So the jellyfish company self-certified that their synthetic lab-made jellyfish stuff was safe to drink in a shake.

Totally legal because we're talking about food products now.

That is how we have this synthetic jellyfish shake and the synthetic jellyfish pill.

And actually, the pill was on the market the whole time.

No one stopped them.

Through all the back and forth with the FDA expressing concerns and all of that, they were just selling it anyway.

And the FTC did that with the jellyfish supplement.

They sued in 2017.

And just a short, almost eight years later, the FTC won its case.