NBTY 3Q revenue up 22%

NEW YORK NBTY CEO Harvey Kamil’s appearance on the “Fox Business Morning C-Suite Sit-Down” is good news for the industry on a couple of levels.

First, it marks Wall Street’s rising awareness around the perfect storm brewing around supplements that’s presently sitting just off America’s shore — baby boomers hungry for reliable healthcare knowledge are finding some of what they’re looking for in dietary supplements to help maintain a healthy lifestyle; that demographic continues to age, which means the need for supplementation ought to increase as well; and the rising costs of what some have coined “sick-care,” or treating disease after the fact, have prompted many to begin seriously exploring preventative healthcare, including supplementation, as a means to not bankrupting the healthcare system within the next generation.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the science supporting supplementation like vitamin D and other nutrients is being vetted and publicized on a daily basis.

Second, that perfect storm is less likely to be diverted by a mountain of criticism today than say five years ago, thanks in large part to good manufacturing practices finally being put into play, the advent of serious adverse event reports and industry associations — the Council for Responsible Nutrition and the Natural Products Foundation to name two — that are aggressively seeking to steer any debate around supplements toward the sound science of today versus what many have described as possible hucksterism in the late 1990s.