Products such as Himalaya salt, ginger tea, green tea, and fish oils are among the 156 health products that Danish food authorities have just recently banned as dietary supplements on the Danish market.  These products are being reclassified as medicines because the manufacturers either made health claims or, in response to the regulators’ questions, have truthfully responded as to the benefits of these products. 

           

Fortunately, thanks to company, consumer, and Danish activists’ persistent complaints to the food authorities, 129 of these 156 health products have now received a temporary reprieve in the form of permission to remain on the health-food market while the Danish Medicines Agency completes its approval of their registration as medicines.  But the basic problem remains. 

           

By comparison, the food authorities in the United Kingdom are much more service minded.  If a supplement manufacturer there makes a health claim for one of its products that is noncompliant with the law, then the UK authorities will the manufacturer a warning and allow it a certain amount of time to correct the problem.  But in Denmark there was no such courtesy extended, the 156 health products were simply banned outright and ordered off the market!

           

While the noose is tightening in the European Union for dietary supplements, in Denmark times are even tougher.  Taking almost a perverse pleasure in it, the Danish Food Administration is doing what it can to make life difficult for the small- and medium-sized health-products companies.  Since these smaller companies are unable to afford the heavy expenses involved in reclassifying their products and/or compiling documentation for their products’ registration as medicines, their products will simply disappear. I guess the Danish economy is doing so marvelously well that Denmark doesn’t need the many jobs and income created by the health-food companies, nor does the country mind the increased healthcare costs it will have to pay because more people get sick from lack of proper prevention.

           

In theory, you are allowed to sell dietary supplements in Denmark if you do not make any health claims connected with them.  But if a supplement is effective for anything at all (and which one isn’t, otherwise why sell it in the first place?), then the producer is now told to document the basis for that effect and reclassify the supplement as a medicine.

           

This new regulation is not at all in compliance with the EU Food Supplements Directive (FSD), which it is supposed to be, because the FSD actually defines food supplements as being a supplement to foods having a physiological effect!  However, the new Danish regulation is really tracking the new, all-encompassing definition of a medicine found in the EU’s Pharmaceutical Directive.  The Danish regulators are leaping ahead in anticipation of even harsher anti-supplement provisions.  And in doing so, they are showing all of us here in Europe what we can expect further down the road – more ill-health and even less sanity.