Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN)

Principal trade association of the U.S. dietary supplement industry, representing manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and formulators. Publishes the annual Consumer Survey on Dietary Supplements, defends the industry before Congress and the Food and Drug Administration, and coordinates the collective response to any proposed change in the regulatory regime established by DSHEA (1994).

Why it matters here

CRN sits in the vocabulary of nutritional adequacy from the supply side. Its interest is in the legal defense of the category dietary supplement, not in the physiological claim that certain nutrients are conditionally essential and that current reference intakes are dimensioned wrong. The two arguments overlap at the surface and diverge at the level that matters: for CRN, the object to be defended is the freedom to sell, and, for this resource, the object to be defined is the right to have a physiological need met.