FDA Banned Supplements List 2026 + DoD Prohibited List

By Erin Rose · Published September 21, 2026 · Sources fetched 2026-09-21 · Methodology · Open data (JSON)

Not medical advice. This page reproduces public FDA and Department of Defense lists with their source links; it does not test products and does not say whether any product on Amazon contains these ingredients.

List 1: ingredients FDA says cannot lawfully be in a supplement

SourceFDA, Dietary Supplement Ingredient Directory (“Information on Select Dietary Supplement Ingredients and Other Substances”), content current as of 2026-05-01, fetched 2026-09-21: 84 entries. Each entry carries FDA’s category code; codes 3 to 7 mean FDA has said the substance is not a lawful dietary ingredient, is a drug, or has not met the safety standard. Codes 1 and 2 are health-claim letters and safety communications, not bans, and are listed separately below.

61 of 84 directory entries. Category counts across the directory: 1: 13 · 2: 19 · 3: 14 · 4: 37 · 5: 2 · 6: 4 · 7: 6 (an entry can carry more than one code). Category wording is FDA’s: (3) Ingredient is not a "dietary ingredient" under section 201(ff)(1) of the FD&C Act; (4) Ingredient is excluded from the dietary supplement definition under section 201(ff)(3) of the FD&C Act; (5) Dietary ingredient has not met the safety standard in section 402(f)(1)(A) of the FD&C Act; (6) New dietary ingredient has not met the safety standard in section 402(f)(1)(B) of the FD&C Act; (7) New dietary ingredient requiring a premarket safety notification under section 413(a)(2) of the FD&C Act but for which no notification has been submitted.

List 2: products FDA found to contain a hidden drug

SourceFDA, Health Fraud Product Database (the successor of the “Tainted Products Marketed as Dietary Supplements” list; the old address redirects here), fetched 2026-09-21. The database holds 2,202 rows across every FDA program; we keep the 1,406 whose subject names an undeclared or hidden ingredient, and classify each by that ingredient. FDA itself warns the list “only includes a small fraction of the potentially hazardous products marketed to consumers”.

Notifications by year: 2007: 15 · 2008: 83 · 2009: 137 · 2010: 71 · 2011: 42 · 2012: 47 · 2013: 95 · 2014: 99 · 2015: 129 · 2016: 81 · 2017: 98 · 2018: 73 · 2019: 66 · 2020: 70 · 2021: 33 · 2022: 38 · 2023: 45 · 2024: 76 · 2025: 44 · 2026: 64. The year-to-year swings track FDA’s enforcement sweeps (import screening and online purchases), not the size of the market.

Every notification since 2025-01-01 (108 products)

Older rows (1,298 products, 2007–2024) are in the open-data file. Each row’s FDA action link is the source for that row.

List 3: DoD prohibited dietary supplement ingredients

SourceOperation Supplement Safety (Uniformed Services University), DoD Prohibited Dietary Supplement Ingredients, prepared under DoD Instruction 6130.06. The page is a search box over an API with no download or published total; we crawled it on 2026-09-21 with 3,000 queries and reached 850 ingredient entries (4,420 names including synonyms). The crawl hit its request budget before the queue was empty, so the count is a lower bound, not the whole list. OPSS states the list was last updated on 26 May 2026.

Service members are prohibited from using any substance in this database as a supplement ingredient, and separately from all controlled substances and drugs. The reasons OPSS attaches to entries, by count: DEA Controlled Substance List: Schedule I (283), DEA Controlled Substance List: Schedule III (110), WADA S1: Anabolic Agents (110), DEA Controlled Substance List: Schedule IV (80), DEA Controlled Substance List: Schedule II (62), Prescription drug (62).