Saturday's Público Investigation Reads Portugal's Suplementos Alimentares Pipeline as a 47% Adult-Use Wave, a +80%-in-Ten-Years Notification Surge and a DGAV Backlog Tracked in 'Tens of Thousands of Avulso Emails'

Público's Saturday 6 June 2026 multi-part investigation by João Pinhal and Tiago Ramalho lands the Portuguese food-supplement (suplementos alimentares) market in a regulatory frame that the country's own Direção-Geral de Alimentação e Veterinária (DGAV, Directorate-General for Food and Veterinary Affairs) characterises in writing as 'tens of thousands of avulso emails' (loose / unconsolidated emails) sitting in Outlook folders rather than in a structured database. The investigation knits together a Universidade de Coimbra (University of Coimbra) doctoral thesis, a homologated inspection report from the Inspeção-Geral da Agricultura, do Mar, do Ambiente e do Ordenamento do Território (IGAMAOT, Inspectorate-General for Agriculture, the Sea, the Environment and Spatial Planning), an industry market-size estimate and a Public Documents Access Commission (CADA, Comissão de Acesso aos Documentos Administrativos) ruling against DGAV.

The headline consumer-side reading: roughly 47% of Portuguese adults surveyed in Maria João Campos's doctoral thesis at Coimbra had consumed at least one food supplement in the prior 12 months. The thesis — defended and approved in January 2026, with results already published in the journal Nutrients — sampled more than one thousand respondents and is not formally extrapolable to the full Portuguese population, but Campos puts the working estimate at 'around 50%' of the adult cohort. The figure aligns with the parallel Spanish reading from the Organización de Consumidores y Usuarios (OCU) on 58% in 2025, up from 42% in 2021, and with the Associação Portuguesa de Suplementos Alimentares (APSA) industry survey at 43.9% in 2024. The Portuguese supplements market is sized in the investigation at more than €600 million.

The institutional-failure reading sits one layer below the consumer wave. Portuguese law permits the legal sale of supplements after an operator files a notificação prévia (prior notification) by email to DGAV — no DGAV authorisation, no DGAV safety-and-efficacy review, no DGAV-issued market-authorisation number — and the email itself is the load-bearing instrument that anchors the entire downstream control framework. DGAV nonetheless concedes in writing to CADA, in a letter signed by Director-General Susana Pombo, that no consolidated database, no structured ficheiro, and no informatised list of those notifications exists. The DGAV's working description of its own tracking mechanism is 'archived in Outlook folders' — a method the IGAMAOT inspection report homologated by Minister of Agriculture and Sea José Manuel Fernandes on 20 October 2025 brands 'ineficiente e promotor da probabilidade de erros' (inefficient and a driver of errors) on cataloguing, consultation and treatment of the information.

Notifications themselves have risen sharply. The Público investigation puts the ten-year notification growth at nearly +80%, with 2024 alone running +16% year-on-year on the inbound side while DGAV's outbound scrutiny capacity shrank by 36% over the same window — a widening regulator-burden gap that the 2021 DGAV self-reading admitted was already handled by 'one technician' against thousands of notifications. The IGAMAOT report warns that the information flowing through those notifications is precisely what should anchor DGAV's risk-based prioritisation of physical controls on the supplement vertical — meaning the email backlog directly compromises the regulator's ability to triage which products warrant lab work, which warrant inspection visits and which warrant market-removal action.

The clinical risk picture has hardened in parallel. The 70%-of-301-health-professionals consumption figure inside Campos's sample frames supplement use as concentrated among the most health-literate cohort, but the investigation also surfaces the polymedicated patient as a target audience — Maria da Graça Campos at the Coimbra Faculdade de Farmácia (Faculty of Pharmacy) cites hipericão (St John's wort) interfering with the contraceptive pill, ginseng paired with statins triggering muscle pain, and the broader supplement-prescription interaction matrix that arrives in the consultório (consulting room) with no medical referral attached. The European Food Safety Authority's standing reading — that most people meet nutrient needs through food and that supplementation is unnecessary outside specific deficiency or disease contexts — frames the public-health load DGAV's email folders are not measuring.

For the expat reader, five practical implications follow. First, supplements bought in Portuguese pharmacies, parafarmácias, online operators or specialised retailers carry no DGAV-issued safety mark and no DGAV pre-market efficacy review — the notificação prévia is an inbound filing, not an outbound authorisation. Second, the Sociedade Portuguesa de Diabetologia, the Ordem dos Médicos (Order of Physicians) and the Ordem dos Farmacêuticos (Order of Pharmacists) recommend mentioning every supplement on the medication list at every SNS or private-clinic consultation — drug-supplement interactions sit outside the standard prescription-software interaction-check libraries. Third, ASAE (Autoridade de Segurança Alimentar e Económica, Food Safety and Economic Authority) handles the market-policing leg downstream of DGAV and has standing complaint channels through livroreclamacoes.pt and ASAE.gov.pt — useful when a product label appears misleading. Fourth, EU Regulation 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims still binds Portuguese-market supplements, but the enforcement gap on health claims (cura, prevenção, tratamento language) is documented across the Público series. Fifth, the investigation flags an end-of-2026 DGAV commitment to deliver a proper database — worth tracking but not yet operational.