Tim Cutliffe, a graduate of nutritional medicine and journalist from Nutraingredients recently interviewed ANH founder, Rob Verkerk PhD, about what is happening across Europe with restrictions on levels of vitamin and mineral food supplements.
Following are some excerpts of the interview with Rob:
We all need to be clear why regulation of high dose vitamin and mineral supplements has been on the cards so long. There have always been two declared drivers for this in the EU: one’s about consumer protection, the other about improving the functioning of the single market. A third motive that’s talked about less is a deliberate yet largely covert attempt by pharma companies to remove from the market therapeutic supplements that compete with drugs.
The natural products industry, as well as many practitioners and consumers reliant on high dose supplements, were deeply concerned by EU-wide harmonisation of maximum permitted levels as proposed in the Food Supplements Directive in 2002. So for over 10 years we all battled to stop it happening. For several years we had the support of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee that kept our petitions open despite the Commission’s attempt to close them down.
In 2010, we published two key peer-reviewed papers in the journal Toxicology that highlighted the problems inherent in the methods being considered by the Commission to determine maximum levels for supplements and fortified foods. Within 5 years, the Commission threw the issue into the ‘too hard basket’ and then shoved it on the backburner despite its commitment to impose harmonised levels EU-wide, as enshrined in Article 5 of the Directive.
So now, Member States are doing their own thing. It’s akin to the Wild West - and the two treasured principles of the EU - consumer protection and enhanced trade within the single market - have fallen by the wayside. In a society in which people are prevented from accessing the vitamin B6 or vitamin D they need, they will have little option other than suffering nutritional deficiencies or they’ll be forced to use pharmaceuticals. Drugs are not only a lot less safe, they are also less likely to restore underlying physiological imbalances - and they incur a much greater cost to the individual and society at large.
That’s why companies selling high dose supplements in Sweden and Holland are now challenging their national regulators in the courts. It’s also why we’ve commissioned the Netherlands-based research institute TNO to develop a new model for micronutrient risk/benefit assessment, the fruits of which were published last year in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. We’re hopeful to soon have raised sufficient funds to commission TNO to specifically put some of the nutrients that are subject to legal challenge through the model to help support the cases.
"For us, it’s all about protecting the future of natural healthcare and the fundamental freedoms and choices that go with that. Removing people’s ability to use natural substances therapeutically when they’re proven to be among the safest group of substances we consume - safer even than foods - makes no sense, scientifically, legally or ethically.”
Read the full Nutraingredients piece published on 13 April 2018 at the following link.
Comments
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19 April 2018 at 9:00 pm
Under the guise of 'consumer' protection is consumer capture.
Regulations as a top down suppression of rivals.
Monopolar system run by power elite/cartels.
The road to hell hacks into our good intentions.
That is to say giving power to wishing rather than actively willing.
The trap has been long prepared and unfolded by which to disempower and subjugate by using our own 'psychology' against us. (Note I don't like the term psychology in many regards because it operates as a distantiating defence against direct psychic involvement. The idea that 'the mind' is an object of study, expertise and 'treatment' AS IF the very act is not operating in or through a psychic-emotional context).
There is no economical interest in losing markets - such as medical and millitary. All costs or wastage is profit and power to those who control and condition such a narrative.
The key of market and mind capture is narrative control, false framing and doublespeak.
Just give true witness for Freedom, true witness for health, embody the true qualities of life and abandon the marketing hype. 'Healthcare' - means sickness management. industry. Otherwise your good intentions will operate as a 'controlled opposition' who operate a placeholder of seeming challenge, that are effectively blocking or diverting from true disclosure on the basis of censor that need not be overt coercion to effectively ensure you don't seriously challenge anything.
I appreciate that in speaking into bureaucracy, you have to speak in terms that can be understood (But you can still call it for what it is) - but in your public communications you might exemplify an educational model of language and approach.
The modern sense of 'liberal' is of a well meaning bubble that has no direct sense of its own loveless or destructive acts - because it believes it is on the right side against the wrong. It is too easy to become the very thing you set out to challenge or change.
I appreciate that Dr Peter Gøtzsche has 'come out' as a human being - against fraud, criminality and corruption (at tragic cost to life), although emotionally backed opinion is very dangerous if not fully owned. But even he starts of his latest book with what is effectively an unwarranted smear on vitamins - which is likely in in-house badge of shared identity in 'real' medicine.
Our blind spots are where our believed and perceived self interest lies.
The 'austerity' of a broad spectrum downgrade of general human populations works in many devious ways to largely get us to do it to ourselves, or accept in under a larger justifying narrative, Scarcity, lack, conflict and powerlessness are the 'environmental conditions' of sickness - be they psychic or physic.
Buzzwords operate subversion of new thought turned to serve the same old agenda.
'Sustainable' - oh dear.
The term arose from a recognition that the industrial economy as structured, runs a out of balance, destructive and therefore unsustainable way of living.
Terms of correctness become rules that consolidate a destructive influence in ways unintended on unanticipated by the clamour to rule life by rules.
I feel that sovereign will - IS - our humanity and not any state issued rights that seek to co-opt under the guise of protection. Yes I believe the Law is necessary as the servant to the whole - as it is to consciousness. But adulterating law as a weapon by the rich and powerful in order to not only disempower and subjugate, but sicken or effectively cull, is only law in name. Where is the Law of awakened responsibility (health)? Is it not in unified purpose?
Szatz and Illich wrote clearly to the thinking that manifests as the 'medical State'. Ghislaine Lanctôt may be outspoken and human rather than 'scientific' in her The Medical Mafia - but is she wrong?
The 'establishment' works a negative agenda based on negative self interest that is largely blind, hidden or unconscious. True interest is not anti-establishment - but pro-choice - with the understanding that choice is only a choice where education and freedom of information allow the evaluation of what one is choosing between.
False framing preempts choice by contextualising in terms of predictable conditioned reaction.
I extend this communication freely in alignment with what I wrote. Freedom must be able to embrace mistake and correct them by moving forward in a new perception as a result of learning or transformation.
The systems of governance are insane because the thinking that they are embodying is insane. Identity in a lie is predicated upon denying feared truth by whatever means work. I believe that this is a collective misidentification but that the symptoms are being assigned to external causes - that become righteously budgeted crusades that protect the disease while purporting to protect us so as to play the double or split mind.
20 April 2018 at 3:55 pm
It's worse than a cowboy shoot out with 81 natural therapy Doctors suffering sudden, unexplained deaths in the USA over the last two years; it's outright murder.(which NO ONE is investigating)
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