“Codex Alimentarius”

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EU set to slash vitamin and mineral doses

24th October 2007

Today the ANH has released its ground-breaking critique of the European Commission's proposal to impose EU-wide restrictions on maximum dosages of vitamins and minerals in food supplements and fortified foods. These methods are likely to form the basis for internationally agreed maximum levels for food/dietary supplements containing vitamins and minerals through Codex Alimentarius, so they have global relevance.

Note: for full ANH Position Paper, click here.
For PDF of press release, click here.

ANH PRESS RELEASE

EU COMMISSION’S PROPOSALS TO LIMIT VITAMIN AND MINERAL DOSES NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE

A group of scientists and doctors, led by Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), Dr Robert Verkerk, and ANH’s Medical Director, Dr Damien Downing, is calling for the European Commission to review the methods it is contemplating using to set maximum permitted levels for vitamins and minerals in food supplements and fortified foods. The scientists claim that the methods being considered are both “unscientific” and “flawed”.

Today the ANH unveils its position paper which explains its reasons for criticising the Commission’s proposals, which are planned to become law EU-wide within the next two years. Robert Verkerk says, “The Commission claims that its methods are scientific but we have found that they do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”.

Under the Food Supplements Directive and Fortified Foods Regulation, the Commission is required to propose maximum and minimum levels of vitamins and minerals for both food supplements and fortified foods. It is expected that the levels will be finalised in 2009 and early indications are that Member States such as the UK, Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland, that have until now allowed relatively high levels, might have to face big reductions in dosages.

Dr Robert Verkerk added: “You know something is wrong when they are thinking of limiting the dose of beta-carotene to the amount you’d find in just two carrots, and restricting selenium to the amount present in less than two brazil nuts. There seems to have been no attempt to test the models against real data. If the Commission really believed these doses might be the highest safe doses, why aren’t they screaming for warning labels to be put on bags of carrots and brazil nuts?”

Dr Damien Downing, also President of the British Society of Ecological Medicine and Editor of the peer reviewed scientific journal, Journal of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine, added: “The methods are simply not fit for purpose. It is the multiple use of safety or uncertainty factors that further compounds the reduction of levels from so-called Safe Upper Levels, that are often overly cautious to begin with. The resulting maximum levels, should these be implemented in law, would prevent many consumers from ingesting the levels of vitamins and minerals needed for optimal health and would also greatly interfere with consumer choice.”

Jill Bell, President of the Irish Association of Health Stores, stated: “The fact that the setting of maximum dosages for vitamins and minerals is being based on such poor science makes a mockery of the EU’s attempts to regulate this area.”

The ANH is meeting today in Dublin with Green Party Health Spokesperson Senator Deirdre de Burca, as well as with the heads of other key organizations, Nutritional Therapists of Ireland, the Irish Association of Nutritional Therapy, the Irish Association of Health Stores and the Irish Health Trade Association.

The ANH’s position paper includes a consideration of features that would be required for the development of a new, scientifically valid and proportionate risk management model. Verkerk added: “We believe a new model should be developed within an independent, academic setting rather than being subject to the often conflicting pressures of industrial stakeholders and political processes. We are hoping that concerns about the European Commission’s proposed approach will help it to drastically alter its proposed approach to the determination of maximum levels, which would otherwise be disproportionate in its effect and may in turn be subject to legal challenge.”

ENDS.

CONTACT

Dr Robert Verkerk
Executive & Scientific Director
Alliance for Natural Health
The Atrium, Curtis Road
Dorking, Surrey RH4 1XA
United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0)1306 646 600
Fax +44 (0)1306 646 552
Email info@anhcampaign.org

NOTES FOR EDITORS

About the European Commission’s proposal

European Commission

Discussion Paper, June 2006: http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/labellingnutrition/supplements/discus_paper_amount_vitamins .pdf

Consultation Responses to Discussion Paper: http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/labellingnutrition/supplements/resp_discus_paper_amount_vit amins.htm

Alliance for Natural Health

ANH Position Paper on Maximum Permitted Levels (released 24 October 2007):
http://www.alliance-natural-health.org/_docs/ANHwebsiteDoc_290.pdf

ANH consultation response (September 2006): http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/labellingnutrition/supplements/documents/anh_en.pdf

About the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH)

The ANH was founded in 2002 and is a UK-based, internationally-active, non-governmental organization, working to help positively shape the regulatory and scientific framework affecting natural health. As an alliance, the ANH brings together, globally, scientists, medical doctors, integrative practitioners, lawyers and consumers, as well as suppliers of food supplements and other health foods, as a means of working towards the development of sustainable approaches to healthcare. The ANH has been involved in extensive consultations with the World Health Organisation, the European Commission, the European Food Safety Authority and a range of EU Member State governments. The ANH brought a legal challenge to the Food Supplements Directive in 2003 which was heard in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in 2004-5 where it received important clarification.

www.anhcampaign.org

The ANH is supported solely by donations. Please help us to help you by making a donation to fund our unique and vital work. Thank you.

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US journal editor launches attack on nutraceutical industry

13th October 2007

Mark Ridinger, editor of the scientific journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, a publication of the esteemed Nature group, has launched a stinging attack on the nutraceutical industry, which he refers to as the “nutraceutical-industrial [N-I] complex”. He’s effected the attack through the pages of the very journal of which he is editor – call it editorial license if you like. The good news is it likely means that our failure to stop taking our nutrients, herbs and other natural concoctions with which we have evolved over thousands of years is really starting to get on the goat of those who’d like us to submit to what they seem to profess is ‘pharmaceutical heaven’.

To read Ridinger’s full paper, click here [this paper will only remain online for a short period so you might want to drop the text into a word processor document and save it on your system for future reference].

Ridinger’s assault, as you will see, leaves no holes barred. It’s the sort of fodder that seeps into the subconscious mind of scientists and doctors who wish to remain close minded about investigating alternatives to the new-to-nature, patented pharmaceutical fodder of mainstream medicine. This sort of stuff is also fed to the media and generates more negative headlines once fuelled by pharma-funded PR companies. Victims of Ridinger’s frenzied attack included vitamin C (said to be no more effective than placebo), glucosamine (said to be completely ineffective along with chondroitin as the molecules were too big to be absorbed by the body) and MLM companies (who were all depicted as being unscrupulous).

It is people like Ridinger who are pushing to kill off the very law, the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act of 1994, that has allowed so many Americans to benefit from natural health. Ridinger says: "The American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and other groups are challenging the DSHEA, calling for five changes to the act, which severely limits the FDA's power over the N-I complex and puts the burden of proof of a nutraceutical's safety on the agency."

We hope you have the time to read Ridinger’s whole piece, but once you’ve done that, take a look at what we had to say about it at the ANH. Click here to download our 6 page PDF document, make yourself a herbal tea, pop some vitamins and enjoy. Just remember, Ridinger is not alone. His viewpoints are seemingly identical to numerous others. They are as off-key as we’ve seen from someone who professes to be the editor of a mainstream pharmacology journal, and may or may not be a singer/songwriter as well (as you’ll see when you read our article).

ANH full response at: http://www.alliance-natural-health.org/_docs/ANHwebsiteDoc_283.pdf

New attack on herbal medicine

4th October 2007

CAM bashing seems to have become a sport for Prof Ernst and colleagues at Peninsula Medical School, University of Exeter, UK. This more recent instance reminds us just how far the science needs to be twisted for Prof Ernst to have managed to make headlines over the risks and lack of efficacy of herbal medicines.

Guo, Canter and Ernst saw their paper entitled ‘A systematic review of randomised clinical trials of individualised herbal medicine in any indication’ today in the Postgraduate Medical Journal (2007;83:633–637).

Prof Ernst and colleagues have done it again

It seems they have wanted to find an excuse to can the practice of patient-specific herbal medicine, a healthcare approach that spans several millennia in different, often extremely diverse, parts of the world. In the authors’ minds they may have succeeded as, lo and behold, they have got themselves headlines in newspapers across the globe which suggest that such herbal medicines are ineffective.

However, when you read between the lines, it’s not hard to see where the hocus pocus truly lies.

Science or hocus pocus?

Guo, Canter and Ernst have entitled their paper: ‘A systematic review of randomised clinical trials of individualised herbal medicine in any indication.’ You would be forgiven for thinking that this was a review of dozens or even hundreds of studies. But just three? Yes, although Prof Ernst and colleagues started their review with a hopeful 1345 references in the peer reviewed literature, their particular and harsh inclusion criteria managed to whittle away some 98.8% of the references leaving just 0.2% - i.e. three! How the journal allowed this paper to be titled a ‘systematic review’ and how they allowed the title to include its relevance to ‘any indication’—is anyone’s guess.

Of the three papers, one ran for 16 weeks and involved IBS sufferers, another for just 10 weeks concerning patients with knee osteoarthritis and the final one covered durations between 12 weeks and 6 months, in the case of patients suffering breast or colon cancer. Can these three trials really be extrapolated to apply to ‘any condition’ and all forms of individualised herbal medicine? Of course not! And more importantly, are they scientifically meaningful as compared when they apply to just three types of condition and cover such short durations, when the real knowledge about these products is among practitioners who have benefited from thousands of years of clinical practice.

One step closer to the medicalisation of herbs?

So while Guo et al may have donned their anoraks and applied their scalpels to an arbitrary package of research that happened to have made it through the peer review publication process, it is the authors’ choice of blatantly incorrect title and conclusion that appears to have been carefully selected to do damage to the herbal medicine sector. Strange as this might seem, regulators around the world are looking for excuses to medicalise herbal products…..wouldn’t this be just the ticket, or at least another nail in the coffin, to try to show that the evidence base is weak, that herbal medicines might be dangerous and that they, in any case, don’t work? Although the authors claim to have consulted herbal practitioner associations during the course of their work, judging by the reaction we’ve heard just today, on the day of release of the study’s findings, we’re not convinced many herbal medicine practitioners will support the study’s conclusion, which states:

“Individualised herbal medicine, as practised in European medical herbalism, Chinese herbal medicine and Ayurvedic herbal medicine, has a very sparse evidence base and there is no convincing evidence that it is effective in any indication. Because of the high potential for adverse events and negative herb–herb and herb–drug interactions, this lack of evidence for effectiveness means that its use cannot be recommended.”

We have a fundamental problem

Scientists like Prof Ernst have become so introspective over their worship of their reductionist methods that they fail to see how they do or don’t relate to the much, much bigger picture of how extremely complex and diverse, natural substances interplay with even more complex and diverse genomes. This truly is an abuse of science.

Read the full paper by Guo, Canter and Ernst here.