As a reader of Health Freedom News you
will no doubt by now be very familiar with the threat that
Codex poses to the future global availability of high-dose
dietary supplements. At the November 2003 meeting of the Codex
Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU)
for example, the Codex Guidelines on Vitamin and Mineral
Supplements advanced from step 3 to step 5 of the 8-stage
Codex ratification process. As such, the danger is growing
that an unjustifiably restrictive Codex standard for vitamins
and minerals could now be finalized within the next twelve
months. The danger that this poses to our future health and
freedoms does not need to be spelled out.
Nevertheless, what is not often appreciated is that the
CCNFSDU is only one
of around 20 different Codex committees that are currently
engaged in the act of setting global "standards" for our food
supply under the guise of free trade "harmonization."
Another one of these committees for example, is the Codex
Committee on Food
Labelling (CCFL), whose mandate is to draft provisions for
what can and cannot be said on the labels of food products,
including of course those on dietary supplements. This
committee meets annually in Canada, and at its most recent
meeting, in May of this year, it agreed to advance a text on
Guidelines for the Use of Nutrition and Health Claims to step
8 of the Codex process. Following a subsequent meeting of the
Codex Alimentarius
Commission that was held in Geneva from 28th June to 3rd July
of this year the Nutrition and Health Claims text was then
ratified as a finalized Codex standard.
The Codex General Guidelines on
Claims
Upon first examining the text of the Codex Guidelines for the
Use of Nutrition and Health Claims one might be forgiven for
thinking that it would allow a wide variety of health claims
for dietary supplements, as amongst other things it states
that health claims should be permitted provided that they are
based on current relevant scientific substantiation. Hidden
away amongst the preamble to the text however is the following
somewhat innocuous-looking statement:
Claims of the type described in
Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines
on Claims are prohibited.
What then, one might reasonably
wonder, are the claims described in Section 3.4 of the Codex
General Guidelines on Claims? Following a little digging
around on the Codex website to find the relevant document one
unearths a MAJOR problem however, in that it turns out that
section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims states
the following:
3. PROHIBITED CLAIMS
3.4 Claims as to the suitability of a food for use in the
prevention, alleviation, treatment or cure of a disease,
disorder, or particular physiological condition unless they
are:
(a) in accordance with the provisions of Codex
standards or guidelines for
foods under jurisdiction of the Committee on Foods for Special
Dietary Uses
and follow the principles set forth in these guidelines;
As such therefore, given that dietary supplements are treated
as foods by Codex, a global standard has now been set that
would, when enforced, prohibit the labels of dietary
supplements from carrying statements that the product can
prevent, alleviate, treat or cure ANY disease or health
condition.
In theory of course, exemption (a) allows the CCNFSDU
to make a provision for health claims for dietary supplements
if it wished. In practice however this is extremely unlikely
to happen. At last year's meeting, for example, the head of
the EU delegation said that "food and the prevention of
diseases do not go together," and that "health claims for
vitamin and mineral supplements should be prohibited."
Similarly, the chairman of the CCNFSDU said that "drugs are to
mitigate and prevent diseases," and that "the role
of food supplements is to support the diet." These views, in
fact, are currently shared by the vast majority of the
national delegations at Codex. As such we can be quite certain
that health claims of the type described under Section 3.4 of
the Codex General Guidelines on Claims will be prohibited.
As a result therefore, the setting of this new global standard
for Nutrition and Health Claims now raises some fundamental
questions.
The FDA Fails to Defend US Law at
Codex.
The head of the US delegation at the Montreal Codex meeting
was a Mr. L. Robert Lake, who is currently Director of the
Office of Regulations and Policy at the Center for Food Safety
and Applied Nutrition in the FDA. Why then, one wonders,
didn't Mr. Lake object to the prohibition on health claims for
food products when he knew that by agreeing to it he was
supporting something that could deny US consumers access to
truthful health information? In the case of Pearson v. Shalala,
for example, the decision
of the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit Court
reaffirmed consumers' First Amendment right to learn about
dietary supplements without unnecessary interference from the
FDA. Nevertheless, Mr. Lake seemingly believes that he and
the FDA have the right to ignore both this judgment and the
free-speech amendment of the US Constitution when
participating in the setting of global standards at Codex
meetings.
In contrast, however, the delegation of South Africa (who,
other than NHF, are currently the only consistently pro-health
freedom delegation at Codex) specifically stated at the
Montreal meeting that section 3.4 was "no longer sustainable
or morally justifiable," and in a passionate speech, Mrs.
Antoinette Booyzen, the head of the South African delegation,
argued that:
In allowing this clause to remain in this Codex Guideline,
this committee evades its responsibility to people of this
planet, by censoring evidence-based scientific information of
the role of nutrition in prevention, alleviation, treatment
and cure of disease.
Mrs. Booyzen then went on to say that:
The question this committee must consider today is:
Are we fully prepared to acknowledge the role of optimum
nutrition in the prevention, alleviation, treatment and cure
of disease, and thereby acknowledge the Codex principle of
basing its standards and guidelines on science?
Nevertheless, her proposal received no support at all from the
other national delegations, who one by one spoke up to oppose
it. Mr. L. Robert Lake for example, when it came to his turn
to speak, on behalf of the US delegation, simply stated that:
We want to join with the other delegations that oppose work on
this item.
Who benefits from the prohibition on health claims?
The real question that we should now therefore be asking
ourselves is: who really benefits from the censoring of
evidence-based scientific information on the role of nutrition
in the prevention, alleviation, treatment, and cure of
disease?
Consumers? Most definitely not.
Manufacturers of dietary supplements? No way.
The pharmaceutical industry? Of course, as the prohibition
ensures that the only products that can make claims relating
to the prevention, alleviation, treatment, and cure of disease
are pharmaceutical drugs.
And does the FDA benefit from this censorship? Naturally, as
it receives vast sums of money from pharmaceutical companies
in return for issuing drug licenses.
What about the Federal Government? They too benefit from the
prohibition, as they in turn receive vast amounts of income in
the form of taxes on pharmaceutical company profits.
As a result we have now gotten down to the very root of the
problem:
By prohibiting all claims that food can prevent, alleviate,
treat, or cure disease, Section 3.4 of the Codex General
Guidelines on Claims essentially protects the patent on the
pharmaceutical industry’s control of our healthcare systems.
Without this clause there would be nothing to prevent
vitamin manufacturers from making the same type of claims for
dietary supplements as the pharmaceutical industry does for
its pharmaceutical drugs. Moreover, if this Section were
dropped from the Codex General Guidelines on Claims, then real
progress could at long last be made in building and cementing
health freedom on a global scale.
The health-freedom movement must now therefore unite against
the growing global restrictions that Codex is throwing in its
way. In particular we must all now call on our national
governments to support the dropping of Section 3.4 from the
Codex General Guidelines on Claims.
There is no comparable industry on the planet where the
manufacturers of a product are legally prevented from telling
their customers the true facts about their products,
especially when those facts are supported by many thousands of
scientific studies. Therefore, unless and until Section 3.4 of
the Codex General Guidelines on Claims is altered in such a
way as it permits claims that food can prevent, alleviate,
treat, or cure disease, the true properties of dietary
supplements will always be censored by the
regulators. If Section 3.4 were dropped,
however, then dietary supplement manufacturers would gain the
same rights in advertising their products as are currently
enjoyed by their pharmaceutical cousins.
Once one understands this, it can easily be seen that the FDA,
the Federal Government, and governments across the globe will
oppose the scrapping of Section 3.4 every step of the way,
because doing so would in time dramatically reduce the income
that they receive from the issuing of drug licenses and taxes
on pharmaceutical company profits. But in the name of
progress, and for the future of healthcare on planet earth,
scrap it we must.
Where are our taxes going?
An elderly uncle of mine in the UK was recently telling me how
he had been unable to get a doctor to come out to see his wife
when she had suffered a mini-stroke one evening. Thirty years
ago, he reminded me, it would have been possible to get a
doctor to come out right away. Clearly then, despite the fact
that within a couple of years the UK government will be
spending around £100 billion annually on its National Health
Service (NHS) the quality of healthcare that UK citizens
receive is decreasing year by year.
Why is this so? Quite simply because along with the rest of
the Western world, the UK NHS is being crippled by the cost of
paying for outrageously expensive pharmaceutical drugs. The
fact that much of this money is being spent on unnecessary,
ineffective, and even harmful treatments - when safer and more
effective natural therapies are already known to exist borders
upon insanity. As such, the scrapping of Section 3.4 of the
Codex General Guidelines on Claims would also free up billions
of dollars of taxpayers' money and circumvent the bankrupting
of our healthcare systems. And this is before we even begin
to consider the further savings that would ensue from
increased numbers of consumers actively engaging in
preventative healthcare via the consumption of dietary
supplements.
Risk-analysis, or risk-benefit analysis?
There is yet another aspect to all of this however. Section
3.4 is also the reason why our regulators engage in
risk-analysis assessment of dietary supplements instead of in
risk-benefit analysis, as under this clause the benefits of
dietary supplements other than the prevention of simple
deficiencies are not supposed to exist. Once Section 3.4 was
removed from the Codex General Guidelines on Claims however,
there would be no reason not to engage in proper
benefit-analysis; and the well-documented beneficial properties of dietary supplements would finally be out in the
open for all to see.
From this point onwards therefore we must all be absolutely
certain where we stand. If we want to defend our access to
dietary supplements and achieve real health freedom we cannot
stand idly by and hope that others will do it for us.
The scrapping of Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines
on Claims would be a major step in the right direction, and
it is up to us all to demand that it comes about. Please
therefore write to your senators and congressmen, as our
future access to truthful health information now depends in
no small part upon this next big step.
If you wish to contact the
Author:
Paul Anthony Taylor
paulandpolly@btinternet.com
Tel: +44 (0)1325-466361
Cell: +44 (0)7903-73834
