BOARD MEMBER INTROSPECTIVE:

PAUL ANTHONY TAYLOR

by Scott Tips

Unfortunately, too many of our members of the National Health Federation Board of Governors are unknown to you, our members and readers; so it only seems appropriate to begin introducing those Board members to you through the pages of Health Freedom News.  The newest Board member is Mr. Paul Anthony Taylor, who just recently joined the Board of Governors through an appointment by NHF President Maureen Kennedy Salaman to fill a vacancy on the Board.

Maureen’s appointment of Paul was made at my suggestion.  I had first met Paul only last Fall when it was suggested to me that he would make an excellent addition to the NHF delegation to the Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting held in Germany every November.  As you may recall, these Codex meetings are important events where various countries come together under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in order to, among other things, establish international rules and regulations governing vitamins and minerals.  The NHF has been sending delegates to these meetings since the year 2000 in order to fight the very restrictive and bureaucratic anti-vitamin goals of many European and other countries.

When I arrived on that bright, sunny November day last year in Bonn, Germany and first met Paul in person, I could see immediately that Paul would be an asset to the NHF and the cause of health freedom.  And, fortunately, he was and continues to be to this very day.

A Musician With Talent

Born in Darlington, England on January 27, 1961, to a musician, Paul seems to have absorbed these skills as he grew up in England.  Early on, Paul studied music and learned how to play keyboards.  He toured as the keyboardist with the American soul singer Bill Withers at the end of the 1980s.  And by the 1990s Paul was known as one of the most successful studio keyboard player/programmers on the London music scene.  During the course of his musical work and career, Paul rubbed shoulders with many of the great musicians and music producers known to us, including Sir Paul McCartney (with whom he dined in the McCartney home), the Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller, John Bon Jovi, and The Chieftains.  He has also worked with the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as on several musical scores for films.

But Paul was not fated to be just another musician.  For one thing, he was too smart to be limited to just one area of life.  For another, he fell very ill with a chronic-fatigue type illness in 1991.  And like many who have been stricken with illnesses in the past, it presented Paul with a challenge that he met and surpassed.  And in doing so, he came to realize just how valuable and important our health freedoms are to us.  Without them, he knew that he could never have found the solution to his own illness that led to his recovery.

The Illness He Overcame

As Paul told me recently, his illness “seems so long ago now, almost like a bad dream!”  It started in the Summer of 1991 and he made all of the usual rounds of doctors, neurologists, acupuncturists, and the like, seeking a cure, but without seeing any difference whatsoever in his health.  It seemed hopeless.

But Paul’s initial turning point was a change in his mind-set, namely an acceptance of the old adage that “you are what you eat.”  After doing some reading on the subject of nutrition, he gradually began to learn that every protein, hormone, enzyme, and neurotransmitter produced in his body in the daily business of keeping oneself alive is manufactured from the nutrients that are consumed as food.  It was that simple and the next logical step in the process was his realization that if you are not consuming enough nutrients to allow your body to manufacture everything it needs to keep you healthy, then you will, inevitably, get sick.  When that light bulb went on in Paul’s head, he knew that all illness, including his own, is a result of nutritional deficiency and that anything can be cured so long as one is able to find out what aspects of one’s own biochemistry are currently in a state of deficiency.

 Paul then thought about what nutrients might be deficient in his own diet, which he had recently changed to a near-vegan diet full of fresh fruit and vegetables.  After much effort to find a doctor in England who would even refer him out for a blood test for his blood-nutrient levels, he finally found one who believed that nutrient levels were important.  Paul took the blood test and the results astounded him.  They showed he was deficient in several important vitamins and minerals and when he then read the deficiency symptoms for those nutrients, Paul’s numerous symptoms co-related almost exactly with the deficiency symptoms of all of the various nutrients that he was clinically short of.

Supplementing with the correct nutrients, Paul saw immediate improvement.  By 1994, he had reached a state of health that was actually superior even to that which he had enjoyed before he got ill.  This had such a profound effect upon Paul that it marked a major turning point in his life.  Henceforth, he became a major proponent of good alternative health-care and nutritional supplementation.

The Health Crusader Meets Wonder Woman

Fortunately for Paul, while he was still living in London, he met his future wife, Polly, who at that time was working as an advertising-industry art director specializing in, of all things, pharmaceutical and medical advertising.  Within weeks they were engaged, then married, and now have two lovely children, Luke and Oliver.  But this merger also produced a fusion of understanding in both Paul and Polly.  She became more conscious of optimum nutrition while Paul came to understand from Polly the way in which the pharmaceutical-medical orthodoxy operates.  Until he met Polly, Paul’s health-freedom campaigning had not fully appreciated and incorporated within it her knowledge of the monopolistic control by allopathic, orthodox medicine of our health choices.  Meeting Polly really opened Paul’s eyes to this dimension of the problem.

A Staunch Advocate for Natural Health and Freedom of Choice

Paul had been campaigning for quite some time for health freedom in Europe when he and I first met.  He was already very familiar with the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the nutrient-strangling direction it was taking.  He was also keenly aware of the heavy restrictions being placed upon vitamins and minerals because of the recently issued European Union “Food Supplements Directive” (FSD) that will soon ban outright more than 300 dietary supplements currently sold in the United Kingdom (UK) and other European countries.  Amazingly, this misguided FSD also shows a marked preference for allowing synthetic forms of vitamins to be sold over the natural forms.  Similarly, the FSD favors inorganic mineral forms over organic minerals, most of which will also be banned.  This immoral regulation is being challenged in the judicial system by a lawsuit filed by the UK-based Alliance for Natural Health, with support from the National Health Federation and Paul.

As Paul and others have pointed out, the FSD is important because it goes hand in glove with the Codex attempts to throttle dietary supplements and remove them as a threat to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.  It was Paul who quickly suggested during the last Codex meeting that the NHF take the lead with the pro-health-freedom South African delegation in promoting higher-level “Nutrient Reference Values” (NRVs) that would provide consumers with optimal nutrient intake of vitamins and minerals rather than the starvation-level amounts suggested by the European Union.  Paul then proceeded to draft an extensive position paper for the NHF setting forth realistic NRVs to submit to the Codex committee.  (See http://www.thenhf.com/codex_11.htm  for the text of his work.)  Hopefully his and the NHF’s work here will bear fruit.

Paul will be attending the next Codex committee meeting this Fall in Bonn, Germany as one of the NHF delegates.  His greatest health-freedom hope is to see nutrient-protective legislation like the American Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act enacted worldwide.  In fact, when asked in a recent interview by a UK health-food industry trade magazine what law he would seek to change first if he were ever Prime Minister, Paul said, “Reverse the implementation of the Food Supplements Directive and harmonize instead to the United States Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act.”  Clearly, Paul’s addition to the NHF Board of Governors adds a very staunch health-freedom fighter with an international element that is sorely needed by NHF these days.