Almost half the catalog is no longer on sale

The DSLD holds 113,539 supplement label records. Of those, 65,490 (57.7%) are flagged as currently on-market and 48,049 (42.3%) are flagged off-market. Put plainly, close to half of every supplement label the database has ever cataloged is no longer being filed by its manufacturer. That ratio is the single most useful thing a shopper or researcher can know about this dataset before drawing any conclusion from it, because it means a raw count of labels is not a count of products you can buy today.

A turnover rate this high is not an accident of the database. It reflects how the US supplement industry actually behaves. Brands launch products quickly, reformulate them often, rotate flavors and bottle sizes, and retire SKUs that did not sell, all without the regulatory friction that governs pharmaceuticals. Each of those moves can close one label record and open another. The result is a catalog where the historical layer is roughly as large as the live layer.

What off-market actually means

The word off-market sounds alarming, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not signal. In the DSLD, a label moves off-market when the manufacturer stops filing that specific label. It is an administrative event, not a safety event. A product can go off-market because it was reformulated under a new label, repackaged into a different bottle size, rebranded after an acquisition, merged into a combination product, or simply discontinued for ordinary commercial reasons. None of those outcomes implies the original product was recalled, adulterated, or found unsafe.

This distinction matters because the same physical product can generate several label records over its life. An original formulation, a reformulated version, and a smaller travel-size bottle can each carry their own label entry. When the first two are retired and the third stays active, the database shows two off-market records and one on-market record for what a shopper would think of as a single evolving product. The off-market count therefore over-states discontinuation relative to the number of distinct products a person would recognize on a shelf.

Why the DSLD preserves discontinued labels

A reasonable question is why a public database keeps tens of thousands of labels for products nobody can buy. The answer is that the historical record has real research and accountability value. Off-market labels let researchers study how formulations changed over time, how an ingredient rose or fell in popularity, and what a consumer was actually exposed to in a given year. Clinicians and toxicologists use historical labels to reconstruct what a patient may have taken when the product is long gone from the market. Regulators and journalists use them to trace how a brand reformulated after a concern was raised.

Deleting discontinued labels would erase that trail and make the live catalog look tidier than the market really is. The 42.3% of records that are off-market are, in effect, the memory of the supplement market. Keeping them is what turns the DSLD from a shopping directory into a longitudinal dataset that supports the kind of analysis PlainVitamins publishes here.

Churn is not evenly spread across categories

Turnover is not uniform. When products are grouped by category and the off-market share is computed for each of the nine largest product types, the rates spread across a visible band rather than clustering on a single value. The category with the highest discontinuation share in this cut is Vitamin at 49.5%, while the lowest is Other Combinations at 36.0%. The chart below the limitations panel shows the full set.

Reading the spread carefully is more useful than reacting to any one bar. A category with a higher off-market share is not a worse or less safe category. It usually signals a faster product cycle: combination blends and trend-driven formulas turn over quickly as brands chase new claims, whereas single-nutrient staples that consumers buy on repeat tend to stay filed longer. The churn rate is best read as a measure of how fast a category reinvents its lineup, not as a verdict on the products within it.

The DSHEA context behind the numbers

All of this sits inside the regulatory frame set by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, known as DSHEA. Under DSHEA, dietary supplements are regulated as a category of food rather than as drugs. Manufacturers do not need pre-market approval to sell most products, and they are responsible for the safety and labeling of what they ship. The Food and Drug Administration can act against unsafe or misbranded products after they reach the market, but the burden does not sit upstream the way it does for prescription medicine.

That light pre-market touch is exactly why turnover runs so high. When a brand can launch, tweak, and retire a label without an approval cycle, the catalog churns fast, and a voluntary label database like the DSLD ends up holding a deep archive of products that came and went. The 42.3% off-market share is, in a sense, a fingerprint of the DSHEA market structure: a low barrier to entry produces a wide, fast-moving, and well-populated historical record.

For anyone using DSLD counts in their own work, the practical takeaway is simple. Decide first whether the question is about the live market or the historical record, then filter the off_market flag accordingly. A claim about how many products contain a given ingredient today should count only on-market labels; a claim about how an ingredient has been used over the years should keep the off-market labels in. Mixing the two without saying so is the most common way these numbers get misread.