Risk Free Vitamins - How Safe is Safe Enough?

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Recent legislative proposals on at least three continents have centered around the perceived need to ensure the safety of natural health products, such as supplements containing vitamins and minerals. Canada has proposed drug-style regulations for supplements. In the US, a proposal termed S 722 seeks to increase the FDA's powers to remove supplements from circulation. Australia recalled 1600 diverse health products in an unprecedented prelude to - what else - tighter regulations. Harmonization across the Tasman seeks to impose the already restrictive Australian rules on New Zealand. Here in Europe, a Directive on Food Supplements was approved, which many fear will remove thousands of hitherto safe products from the market in the name of "consumer protection". The transformation of this directive into national law is being challenged in a London Court by a coalition of groups and individuals made up of practitioners, consumers and a few manufacturers. The European Court of Justice will have to deal with the matter. As if that was not enough, Codex Alimentarius, an international standard-setting body for foods under the auspices of the World Health Organization is considering restrictions on Vitamins in international trade.

The one common line of justification for all this legislative fervour is: "Consumer protection". Hogwash, one might be tempted to say, when considering what New Zealand researcher Ron Law has found and described in a number of graphics: Vitamins and food supplements in general are by far the safest product category around. According to the government's own statistical data as published in prestigious medical journals and on government websites, supplements are far safer than even plain ordinary food.

On the other side, pharmaceutical medicines, correctly registered, approved and properly prescribed, are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths every year and have become a leading cause of death and injury.

So clearly, the consumer protection argument does not wash. Why protect anyone from something that is not dangerous while exposing them to government mandated medical peril?

Certainly there are pharmaceutical lobby interests that would be overjoyed at seeing severe restrictions for those pesky health foods that keep spoiling the bottom line. Business is business, to be sure. It is an essential trait of pharmaceutical business that it can only fluorish when illness is widespread. That is a hard fact, but one we tend to want to overlook - possibly we think we might be thought of as "uncharitable" with our fellows in the medical and pharmaceutical field, if we did bring up the subject.

According to the definition of a medicinal product in the EU and elsewhere, prevention is, along with diagnosis and cure, a characteristic part of what we consider to be part of medicine. But in real life, prevention is incompatible with the business of cure. If I can prevent all diseases, no one will need a cure. So who is going to believe that - when given responsibility for both prevention and cure - I will seriously work on prevention? Only someone who cannot put two and two together. The money is in the cure - not in prevention.

What laughingly passes for "prevention" in modern medicine, vaccination for one, lowering your cholesterol level for another - just to quote two egregious examples - is really an activity meant to drum up business for the "cure" department. We know that vaccinations are not exactly strengthening the immune system, and that cholesterol lowering drugs, to some, are outright dangerous.

These facts are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. So how could it be that pharma lobbies have such an easy time convincing legislators of the "urgent need" to regulate supplements? What is the trick they are using?

Apart from slanted media reports and ordinary corruption, the pharma boys have hit upon a great idea: The "reasonable" evaluation of vitamin safety by high power pharmaceutical experts and the consequent setting of "Safe Upper Limits". This is such a seemingly reasonable request that it has already been enshrined in the European Food Supplements Directive and is proposed in upcoming Codex regulations. What reasonable politician would not want to agree to "scientifically sound" safety proposals for vitamins?

Unfortunately the "safety evaluations" so far proposed are hopelessly slanted - so much so that the "safe levels" arrived at in most cases are also "no effect levels" meaning that the levels are useless for preventing anything but the most severe deficiency diseases, which incidentally have no longer been with us for decades.

Alan Gaby has analyzed the question of "upper safe limits" on the example of the UK "Expert Group's report on Vitamins and Minerals". His article is being published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Nutrition, in a Special Issue titled "The Safety and Efficacy of Vitamins". To get the full text with references, you will have to order the Journal, which also contains a number of other interesting articles. Here is a preview of the Gaby article:

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