The Hidden Forces Suppressing Natural Health in America: The Six Key Barriers

2. Who Controls the Money and Markets?

Natural health is constrained at the level of evidence, where money determines what qualifies as “science.” In 1991, about 80% of industry-funded clinical trials were conducted in academic medical centres; by 2004, that figure had fallen to 26%, replaced by for-profit research organisations contracted by drug companies. This shift has untold impact: study designs, publications, regulations, and medical education reflect pharmaceutical interests, leaving natural therapies– without comparable capital– unable to produce the forms of evidence regulators, insurers, and clinicians are structurally conditioned to demand.

Markets then reinforce this imbalance. Just four retailers control around 65% of grocery sales, while seeds, meat, and grain trading are 60–90% concentrated. Online, gatekeepers such as Amazon and Walmart determine visibility, pricing pressure, and data access. Natural brands must pay for shelf space, surrender customer data, and risk rapid imitation, while pharmaceutical and ultra-processed products benefit from scale, marketing budgets, and preferential placement across supply chains and pharmacies.

Finally, the squeeze extends into innovation and medical culture. Following the Myriad case, naturally occurring substances are largely excluded from patent protection, leaving high research costs with little legal protection. Without IP protection, investors see little upside, research dries up, and innovation slows. Combined with regulatory capture and heavy pharmaceutical lobbying, control of money and markets systematically prioritises pharmaceutical over natural health and substances long before consumers are offered a real choice.

3. Who Decides “Standard Care”?

Natural health is further squeezed by who defines “standard care. Evidence-based medicine has elevated randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to a near-exclusive gold standard, despite clear limits. One analysis found 36% of highly cited RCTs were later contradicted or shown to have weaker effects, while RCTs routinely exclude older, multi-morbid, and real-world patients. Because industry funds most large trials, the hierarchy is skewed: 69% of industry studies focus on drugs, while a mere 1.5% examine behavioural changes. When RCTs are treated as the only valid evidence, therapies without patent-driven funding struggle to generate the evidence required to be recognised as “standard care.”

Funding and publication bias reinforce this hierarchy. Industry-sponsored studies are about 27% more likely to favour the sponsor’s product, and roughly 69% of industry-funded comparative effectiveness studies focus on drugs, while negative results are routinely suppressed. For instance, in antidepressant research, roughly 92% of trials with negative or questionable outcomes were never published or were misrepresented, while positive trials were almost always published. Nutrition research remains sidelined, stagnating at about 5% of total NIH funding for over two decades, while US cancer nutrition funding fell 44% between 2012 and 2018. What is underfunded is under-studied, and what is under-studied rarely becomes “standard.”

Professional policing then locks these standards in place. In 2024 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent $294 million on lobbying, while industry funding now covers about 70% of doctor training. Guidelines built on this evidence base are enforced through reimbursement rules and medical boards that determine acceptable practice. During the pandemic, clinicians prioritising nutrition, prevention, or off-guideline approaches were suspended or barred from practice, signalling that deviation carries real risk. By controlling the evidence, the education, and the licenses, the system ensures that “standard care” remains drug-centred while systematically marginalising natural health.

4. Who Controls What You’re Allowed to Hear?

Natural health is constrained not only by evidence rules, but by visibility itself. As the saying goes, “he who pays the piper dictates the tune.” Legacy media is structurally dependent on pharmaceutical advertising: between January and October 2024, pharma brands spent $7.9 billion on ads, with over $5.3 billion going to national and local TV, accounting for roughly 10–12% of all TV ad revenue. Prescription drug ads alone drove 11.6% of national linear TV spend. This dependence creates incentives to avoid narratives that challenge drug-centred models while marginalising alternatives that do not buy airtime.

Beyond commercials, the flow of information is constrained through biased “fact-checking” and algorithmic suppression. Platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter use downranking, demonetisation, shadow banning, and deplatforming to suppress health content that diverges from “authoritative sources.” In 2022, Facebook censored a peer-reviewed investigation by The British Medical Journal (BMJ) into Pfizer’s vaccine trials, labeling it “missing context” despite the fact-checker identifying no factual errors. Natural health brands also face advertising suspensions for “health claims” or using words like “treat” or “prevent,” even when discussing evidence-based substances.

Pharma also shapes discourse via Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). For example, a 2024 study investigating the 200% increase in opioid-related deaths (2000–2014), found that companies like Purdue Pharma and Janssen drove widespread opioid prescribing through KOL networks. Today, this manufactured consensus extends to digital platforms where “patient influencers” are paid to promote medications. By framing natural health as “unproven” and using coordinated reporting campaigns to stigmatise non-drug interventions, the system ensures that what the public hears is not the full scientific truth, but a carefully curated pharmaceutical narrative.

5. How Risk and Law is Weaponised

Legal and liability pressures have become another mechanism through which natural health is squeezed. Regulators increasingly rely on a “risk-based” enforcement framework that magnifies isolated incidents to justify broader restrictions on entire categories of natural products.

A clear example in the US relates to FDA’s 2019 withdrawal of Compliance Policy Guide (CPG) 400.400, which for more than three decades allowed homeopathic products to be marketed under enforcement discretion without necessitating a full drugs license if they met labeling and manufacturing standards set by the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS). Removing that policy effectively exposed traditional remedies to the same “new drug” approval standards applied to pharmaceuticals– an impossible threshold for non-patentable substances that cannot recover the roughly $2.6 billion cost of modern drug development. The disparity is striking: conventional pharmaceuticals account for more than 99% of adverse drug events reported to the FDA, while homeopathic products represent only a minute fraction of one percent. That’s why we’re engaged in a lawsuit to correct this wrong that is, otherwise, likely to eliminate an entire modality of alternative medicine.

Regulatory scrutiny is further reinforced through a steady stream of investigations into products marketed as natural. State Attorney General actions frequently target categories such as foods and dietary supplements, weight-loss and wellness products sold online, and CBD or cannabis-derived supplements. Of course, oversight of adulterated or misbranded products is a legitimate consumer-protection function. However, enforcement often concentrates disproportionately on natural health categories, with highly publicised investigations and warning campaigns that shape public perception even when issue stem from isolated violations. The result is selective pressure: the entire sector face reputational damage, regulatory uncertainty, and the high cost of compliance or litigation.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical drugs, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, are responsible for nearly 2 million emergency-department visits annually in the United States. Despite this significant safety burden, pharmaceuticals continue to be framed as the default “safe” option. The resulting asymmetry is clear: natural health products face heightened scrutiny and legal exposure, while pharmaceutical interventions retain institutional credibility and market dominance.

6. How Our Minds Are Manipulated

Natural health is also squeezed at the level of mindset, through cultural conditioning that reshapes what people consider “normal” health. When the average American develops a headache, the instinct is often to reach for paracetamol [acetaminophen] (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Advil). Rarely is the first question: Am I dehydrated? Did I sleep poorly? Is stress, posture, or diet contributing to my problem? This reflex reflects a shift from addressing causes to suppressing symptoms. Over time, it narrows the solutions people consider, pushing nutrition, lifestyle change, and other preventive approaches to the margins before they are explored.

The same conditioning shapes how society views chronic illness. More than 75% of US adults live with at least one chronic condition, and over half have two or more. Diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer account for 8 of the 10 leading causes of death, while treatment consumes over 90% of the nation’s $4.9 trillion annual healthcare spending. As these conditions become widespread, medication use becomes routine: about one-third of Americans in their 60s and 70s take five or more prescription drugs regularly, a pattern known as polypharmacy. What might once have signalled systemic health failure is increasingly treated as simply part of modern life.

At the same time, key drivers of poor health are normalised. Ultra-processed foods now make up about 60% of daily calories in the US, while studies show nutrient levels in some vegetables have declined since the mid-20th century. The result is a population that is often overfed yet micronutrient deficient. Rather than addressing these underlying causes, the dominant response remains pharmaceutical management. The cycle reinforces itself: unhealthy environments produce chronic illness, illness fuels drug dependence, while natural health is pushed to the background.

The Future

The future of natural health in the US—as well as in other parts of the world with elaborate, Big Pharm and Big Food controlled regulatory systems—will not be decided by science alone. Ultimately it will depend on how these six macro-drivers are confronted together. Pharmaceuticals still remain far and away the most substantial influence on health, and Big Pharma still holds a dominant market share of the types of vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids and botanicals available through major multiples and pharmacy. Big Pharma and Big Food’s tentacles reach deep into almost every area that controls which products, services and health information to which the majority of the population have access. They have a disproportionate influence on political systems, regulation, markets, medical standards, information control, legal pressure, and cultural conditioning. All six of these macro-drivers must be tackled simultaneously if we’re to restore balance, allowing nature to be reinstated as the most important influence on our health, an interaction that is the product of our co-evolution with natural systems over millennia.

This matters because the current health trajectory is unsustainable and millions are destined to suffer and receive substandard support of their health. With aging populations and spiralling rates of chronic disease that now affect the majority of adults, together ever growing costs of healthcare that fails to address the underlying causes of disease, prevention can no longer remain peripheral. Nutrition, herbal medicine, lifestyle medicine, and a gamut of natural interventions offer pathways that support the body’s inherent capacity for health.

The goal is not to replace modern medicine but to remove the prejudices against natural medicine and offer choice. A future where natural health is protected, researched, and accessible would not only expand choice, it would help move healthcare from a system built around managing disease through largely synthetic, chemical interventions, to one capable of sustaining human health because natural systems tend to work in concert with our bodies and minds, not against them.

ANH Action Plan in the US

Since leading, US constitutional attorney Jonathan Emord (who has been gifted the moniker the “FDA Dragon Slayer” given he holds the record for lawsuit wins against the FDA) joined ANH-USA as General Counsel in mid-2024, we have embarked on a radical plan involving over 30 distinct legal and regulatory initiatives to combat the problems we describe in this article. We are unfolding this plan by way of an array of lawsuits, other legal initiatives, campaigns, and political Action Alerts about which you can find out more in articles accessible on our website, anh-usa.org.

You can sign up to our free weekly US newsletter and be kept abreast of our implementation of this unique plan, which centres on bringing in natural health from the margins, and embracing it at the heart of human health care. We are also very grateful for any donations to help support this work.

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