Our Access to Vitamins and Supplements is in Jeopardy

There is a fairly simple way around this, actually. Instead of producing large pills where you only take one, produce very small pills where you can easily take dozens at once. So instead of one big 500mg Vitamin C pill, you take 8-9 little 60mg Vitamin C pills.

This post makes no sense and smells like urban legend hype. I did check snopes.com and it's not there yet, but I see no hallmarks of reliability.

The Codex is a WHO standard for foods moving in international commerce. It's a standard that prevents countries from adopting bogus health and safety standards that are unscientific to prevent the sale of foreign foodstuffs in their countries. So first off, it doesn't apply to domestically produced / domestically sold stuff anyway.

Second, given the multi-billion dollar supplement industry controls a lobby in Congress comparable to the tobacco and porn industries, I'll start worrying when they start worrying. I haven't seen them worrying.

Third, a google search on the Codex seems to turn up an unusually large number of snake oil salesmen and crystal health vortex crackpots. When snake oil salesmen and the new agey crackpots are the only ones worried about something, my first presumption is that it's probably a good thing.

Outlawing Dietary Supplements: Is This Finally the End?

The freedom to choose what health care you wish for yourself and family is under big attack by European governments and drug cartels. Sue and I had an experience of this last year while doing some Missionary work in Belfast Northern Ireland. We went into a pharmacy looking for some refills on our supplements and found we could not buy amino acids, DHEA, melatonin, and many other products without a doctors Rx. The message: Natural supplements are not safe for the public.

There is an evil worldwide campaign going on to limit your freedom to chose the supplements you need. Only coordinated action will stop them. Here is a letter from Dr. Ronald Peters, M.D., that gives an excellent summary of what is going on. Please read it and do what you can to help to preserve health freedom for all of us.

"The European Union Food Supplements Directive (FSD) is scheduled to go into effect in August 2005. This EU law will control supplement sales in 25 EU countries.

Under the new law, only supplements at low dose, i.e. one to three times the RDA will be available without prescription. This means for example that you will need a prescription from a doctor to get vitamin C 1000mg. Many popular bioavailable supplements such as mixed tocopherols vitamin E, selenomethionine and chromium picolinate will be outlawed. Individual amino acids like tyrosine and 5-hydroxytryptophan will also be outlawed. Herbs, such as garlic, ginger and curcumin will be reclassified as drugs and stringently regulated.

Australia recently removed 1,600 supplement products (80% of those available) from health food stores. This was done under the Therapeutic Goods Act, which will regulate supplements like drugs.

During the summer of 2003, Canada quietly harmonized its supplement regulations to those of Australia. They have not yet been implemented, because they want to do it gradually in order to avoid waking up Canadian citizens and supplement users to the threat until it is too late.

Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uraguay and soon Bolivia and Chile have also agreed to follow the Australian lead and submit supplement regulations to the EU Food Supplement Directive.

From November 1 through 5, 2004, the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods met in Bonn, Germany. Approximately 50 nations attended in order to finalize worldwide standards for nutritional supplements, with final ratification expected to occur in June 2005. It is expected that the EU delegation will be pushing supplement standards more or less equivalent to the EU Food Supplement Directive.

You may be thinking that this could never happen in the USA, the so-called "land of the free". Well, think again.

The Codex Committee is part of a larger organization called the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for "food code"), which was set up in 1963 under the auspices of the United Nation's World Health Organization. The purpose of Codex is to create comprehensive world-wide food standards to maximize the ease and safety of world food trade. All of this in order "to protect consumers".

In the mid-1990s, Codex signed an agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO), by which Codex creates trade standards that the WTO can use to resolve international trade disputes. The WTO is the group charged with enforcement of the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which the USA signed onto in 1994.

In a letter to Congressman Dan Burton in 2001, Congressman Ron Paul DeFazio made the following observations: "While Codex has no direct authority to force Americans to adopt stringent regulations of dietary supplements, we are concerned that the United States may be forced to adopt Codex standards as a result of the WTO. According to an August 1999 Report of the Congressional Research Service, 'As a member of WTO, the United States does commit to act in accordance with the rules of the multilateral body. It (the USA) is legally obligated to ensure national laws do not conflict with WTO rules.' If Congress were to refuse to 'harmonize' U.S. laws according to strict Codex/WTO guidelines, a WTO 'dispute resolution panel' could find that the United States is engaging in unfair trade because of our failure to 'harmonize' our regulations with the rest of the world. Therefore in any dispute with a country that has adopted the Codex standards, it is highly probable that America would lose and be subject to heavy sanctions unless Congress harmonized our laws with the other WTO countries."

The "heavy sanctions" referred to are billions of dollars in tariffs (import taxes) that WTO would authorize WTO Codex nations to lay on U.S. exports of any kind. This would make U.S. goods overpriced to the world market and thus hard to sell, possibly leading to U.S. trade losses in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. The U.S. Congress would surely cave in under such pressure, repeal DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which currently safeguards our supplements) and adopt the anti-supplement Codex regulations. Congress has already given in to past WTO disputes in order to avoid sanctions.

Make no mistake about it. There is a world-wide effort to extinguish vitamin freedom all over the world, including (especially) the USA. It is being driven by a consortium of drug companies and power-hungry regulatory bureaucrats, such as the FDA.

In 1997, acting FDA Commissioner Michael Friedman stated in a speech before the Senate Labor Committee: "FDA plans to amend its regulations and procedures for consideration of standards adopted by Codex. This action is being taken to provide for the systematic review of Codex standards in order to enhance consumer protection, promote international harmonization, and fulfill the obligations of the United States under international agreements."

In November 2000, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) issued a press release regarding dietary supplements. A working group of the TABD had just agreed to "Encourage the scientific bodies responsible for the evaluation of the safety of total intakes of vitamins and minerals to cooperate closely to harmonize setting upper safe levels for vitamins and minerals." The press release also stated: "The TABD ...seeks...the removal of ...differences in the EU and U.S. regulatory systems."

The TABD has 120 members, mostly pharmaceutical-type vitamin companies. Many U.S. vitamin companies are now owned by, or partnered with, pharmaceutical drug companies. The world drug industry wishes to remove consumer's ability to maintain their health or fight disease through nutritional supplements, thereby forcing them back into the much more lucrative toximolecular pharmaceutical drug market.

What can you do?

In spite of the fact that the innovative, relatively free U.S. supplement market could begin to disappear as early as 2006, all is not yet lost. There are various actions we can still take.

The Alliance for Natural Health has filed a lawsuit in the European Court of Justice to overturn the Food Supplement Directive on multiple legal grounds. It is being litigated by a law firm that has already succeeded in overturning other EU directives. If it can be overturned before Codex regulations are finalized, it will take much of the steam out of the EU Codex delegation's efforts to model final Codex regulations on the EU Food Supplement Directive.

You can help by donating money (even $5 or $10 helps) for this costly battle to the Alliance at www.alliance-natural-health.org. Please do it now. The supplements you save may be your own.

Next, please write, call, fax and e-mail your U.S. senators and representatives. Urge your senators to oppose S. 722, the Dietary Supplement Safety Act, and urge your Congressperson to oppose H.R. 3377, the Dietary Supplement Access and Awareness Act. These misnamed bills would hand great new powers to the FDA to treat dietary supplements as drugs, doing away with most of the protection that consumers and the supplement industry gained under DSHEA.

Also ask our Senators to oppose S. 1538, the DSHEA Full Implementation and Enforcement Act. This bill would give the FDA $105 million to use to harass vitamin manufacturers, and health food stores, under the FDA's biased, anti-supplement interpretation of the DSHEA.

Also, let elected officials in Congress know you don't want them to buckle under any future WTO pressure to conform U.S. laws to anti-supplement Codex standards. Please realize that pharmaceutical industry lobbyists donate $100 million yearly to the re-election campaigns of representatives and senators. Unless they get large numbers of angry, forceful letters, calls, e-mails, etc, they will naturally tend to take the drug industry's interests into account before yours.

In order to educate yourself further about this issue, check out the work being done by The International Advocates for Health Freedom (www.iahf.org). This is a grass-foots organization that has been fighting Codex and trying to alert America to the danger since 1996.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not control them based on special interest profit motives. You can change all this.

Blessings,

Ronald Peters, MD

PS. Most of the material in this email was adapted from an article titled "Dietary Supplements Under Imminent Threat," published in Vitamin Research News, vol. 18, number 10, November 2004

http://www.optimumhealthreport.com/articles/outlawing.asp

http://ahha.org/codexpp2004.htm

Herbs, such as garlic, ginger and curcumin will be reclassified as drugs and stringently regulated. Australia recently removed 1,600 supplement products (80% of those available) from health food stores.

We cannot endangered well deserved profits of pharmaceutical companies. Garlic for example has strong antiviral properties and can be used as anti flu/anti common cold remedy (pour boiling milk over few crushed pieces of garlic, cover, wait few minutes, strain and drink - very tasty and works great!)

Allowing unpatentable, unregulated, cheap, easy to grow remedies undermines the sound principles of the economy based on profit. They should be illegal and prosecuted as part of the war on drugs.

Allowing unpatentable, unregulated, cheap, easy to grow remedies undermines the sound principles of the economy based on profit. They should be illegal and prosecuted as part of the war on drugs.

OMG...give me a break.

Voila. Another email. Don't you have any sources?

"(1) No supplement can be sold for preventive or therapeutic use. (2) Any potency higher than RDA (minimal strength) is a "drug" requiring a prescription and must be produced by drug companies."

Looks like the pharmaceuticals have got a new revenue source. This has their fingerprints all over it.

When I was in France a few years ago, I got a terible cold. I couldn't even buy sudafed without geting a perscription. French co-workers were surprised that you can but things without seeing a doctor first. They thought it was terribly irresponsible of the government to let consumers endanger their health without supervision of the medicines they take.

Whether this may or may not be a threat to our health choices (and sovereign rule) there are homegrown efforts to control your health regimen choices right here:

From the Save Our Supplements.org homepage-

"As you read this, leaders in Washington are working to restrict your access to dietary supplements - including the safe, effective, and affordable vitamins, minerals, and herbs you depend on for your health.

While more than 70 percent of Americans use dietary supplements, some lawmakers want to pass laws that will create roadblocks to supplement access, making it harder for you to purchase the products you rely on for good health. If you believe consumers deserve real health choices, tell Washington to Save Our Supplements."

Well worth checking out.

French co-workers were surprised that you can but things without seeing a doctor first.

They have national health system.

"over 4 million Americans told Congress and the President to protect their freedom of choice on health supplements."

Were these people a spontaneous uprising, or were they organized? If the latter, can they be organized again?

It's not only WHO, it's the billions the wealthy US Drug Companies spend to buy our politicians. They are one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. WHy do you think Medical Marijuana is passed by the citizens, and constantly overthrown by our politicians? The Drug Companies want to see you expensive, worthless drugs when you can find pain relief for a dollar a joint. Can't have that...business must rule.

Hey, EW.

I know that using Echinacea, Vitaman C and Zinc lozenges has put a stop to this old git's frequent bouts with pneumonia. These low cost supplements do the job while expensive medications seem hit-and-miss at best (and always threaten a wide variety of weird side-effects).

"Hi! We're from the government and we're here to help." Help create another black market?