'Codex - The Root of the Problem Identified' by Paul Anthony Taylor

November 26, 2004

http://www.communicationagents.com/emma_holister/2004/11/05/codex_the_root_of.ht\

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November 05, 2004

'Codex - The Root of the Problem Identified' by Paul Anthony Taylor

Health Freedom

" Who benefits from the prohibition on health claims?

The pharmaceutical industry? Of course, as the prohibition ensures

that the only products that can make claims relating to the

prevention, alleviation, treatment, and cure of disease are

pharmaceutical drugs.

And does the FDA benefit from this censorship? Naturally, as it

receives vast sums of money from pharmaceutical companies in return

for issuing drug licenses. "

September 2004

http://www.thenhf.com/codex_16.htm

As a reader of Health Freedom News you will no doubt by now be

very familiar with the threat that Codex poses to the future global

availability of high-dose dietary supplements. At the November 2003

meeting of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special

Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) for example, the Codex Guidelines on Vitamin

and Mineral Supplements advanced from step 3 to step 5 of the 8-stage

Codex ratification process. As such, the danger is growing that an

unjustifiably restrictive Codex standard for vitamins and minerals

could now be finalized within the next twelve months. The danger that

this poses to our future health and freedoms does not need to be

spelled out.

Nevertheless, what is not often appreciated is that the CCNFSDU is

only one of around 20 different Codex committees that are currently

engaged in the act of setting global " standards " for our food supply

under the guise of free trade " harmonization. "

Another one of these committees for example, is the Codex

Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL), whose mandate is to draft

provisions for what can and cannot be said on the labels of food

products, including of course those on dietary supplements. This

committee meets annually in Canada, and at its most recent meeting, in

May of this year, it agreed to advance a text on Guidelines for the

Use of Nutrition and Health Claims to step 8 of the Codex process.

Following a subsequent meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission

that was held in Geneva from 28th June to 3rd July of this year the

Nutrition and Health Claims text was then ratified as a finalized

Codex standard.

The Codex General Guidelines on Claims

Upon first examining the text of the Codex Guidelines for the Use

of Nutrition and Health Claims one might be forgiven for thinking that

it would allow a wide variety of health claims for dietary

supplements, as amongst other things it states that health claims

should be permitted provided that they are based on current relevant

scientific substantiation. Hidden away amongst the preamble to the

text however is the following somewhat innocuous-looking statement:

Claims of the type described in Section 3.4 of the Codex General

Guidelines on Claims are prohibited.

What then, one might reasonably wonder, are the claims described

in Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims? Following a

little digging around on the Codex website to find the relevant

document one unearths a MAJOR problem however, in that it turns out

that section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims states the

following:

3. PROHIBITED CLAIMS

3.4 Claims as to the suitability of a food for use in the

prevention, alleviation, treatment or cure of a disease, disorder, or

particular physiological condition unless they are:

(a) in accordance with the provisions of Codex standards or

guidelines for foods under jurisdiction of the Committee on Foods for

Special Dietary Uses and follow the principles set forth in these

guidelines;

As such therefore, given that dietary supplements are treated as

foods by Codex, a global standard has now been set that would, when

enforced, prohibit the labels of dietary supplements from carrying

statements that the product can prevent, alleviate, treat or cure ANY

disease or health condition.

In theory of course, exemption (a) allows the CCNFSDU to make a

provision for health claims for dietary supplements if it wished. In

practice however this is extremely unlikely to happen. At last year's

meeting, for example, the head of the EU delegation said that " food

and the prevention of diseases do not go together, " and that " health

claims for vitamin and mineral supplements should be prohibited. "

Similarly, the chairman of the CCNFSDU said that " drugs are to

mitigate and prevent diseases, " and that " the role of food supplements

is to support the diet. " These views, in fact, are currently shared by

the vast majority of the national delegations at Codex. As such we can

be quite certain that health claims of the type described under

Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims will be prohibited.

As a result therefore, the setting of this new global standard for

Nutrition and Health Claims now raises some fundamental questions.

The FDA Fails to Defend US Law at Codex.

The head of the US delegation at the Montreal Codex meeting was a

Mr. L. Robert Lake, who is currently Director of the Office of

Regulations and Policy at the Center for Food Safety and Applied

Nutrition in the FDA. Why then, one wonders, didn't Mr. Lake object to

the prohibition on health claims for food products when he knew that

by agreeing to it he was supporting something that could deny US

consumers access to truthful health information? In the case of

Pearson v. Shalala, for example, the decision of the United States

Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit Court reaffirmed consumers' First

Amendment right to learn about dietary supplements without unnecessary

interference from the FDA. Nevertheless, Mr. Lake seemingly believes

that he and the FDA have the right to ignore both this judgment and

the free-speech amendment of the US Constitution when participating in

the setting of global standards at Codex meetings.

In contrast, however, the delegation of South Africa (who, other

than NHF, are currently the only consistently pro-health freedom

delegation at Codex) specifically stated at the Montreal meeting that

section 3.4 was " no longer sustainable or morally justifiable, " and in

a passionate speech, Mrs. Antoinette Booyzen, the head of the South

African delegation, argued that:

In allowing this clause to remain in this Codex Guideline, this

committee evades its responsibility to people of this planet, by

censoring evidence-based scientific information of the role of

nutrition in prevention, alleviation, treatment and cure of disease.

Mrs. Booyzen then went on to say that:

The question this committee must consider today is:

Are we fully prepared to acknowledge the role of optimum nutrition

in the prevention, alleviation, treatment and cure of disease, and

thereby acknowledge the Codex principle of basing its standards and

guidelines on science?

Nevertheless, her proposal received no support at all from the

other national delegations, who one by one spoke up to oppose it. Mr.

L. Robert Lake for example, when it came to his turn to speak, on

behalf of the US delegation, simply stated that:

We want to join with the other delegations that oppose work on

this item.

Who benefits from the prohibition on health claims?

The real question that we should now therefore be asking ourselves

is: who really benefits from the censoring of evidence-based

scientific information on the role of nutrition in the prevention,

alleviation, treatment, and cure of disease?

Consumers? Most definitely not.

Manufacturers of dietary supplements? No way.

The pharmaceutical industry? Of course, as the prohibition ensures

that the only products that can make claims relating to the

prevention, alleviation, treatment, and cure of disease are

pharmaceutical drugs.

And does the FDA benefit from this censorship? Naturally, as it

receives vast sums of money from pharmaceutical companies in return

for issuing drug licenses.

What about the Federal Government? They too benefit from the

prohibition, as they in turn receive vast amounts of income in the

form of taxes on pharmaceutical company profits.

As a result we have now gotten down to the very root of the problem:

By prohibiting all claims that food can prevent, alleviate, treat,

or cure disease, Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims

essentially protects the patent on the pharmaceutical industry's

control of our healthcare systems.

Without this clause there would be nothing to prevent vitamin

manufacturers from making the same type of claims for dietary

supplements as the pharmaceutical industry does for its pharmaceutical

drugs. Moreover, if this Section were dropped from the Codex General

Guidelines on Claims, then real progress could at long last be made in

building and cementing health freedom on a global scale.

The health-freedom movement must now therefore unite against the

growing global restrictions that Codex is throwing in its way. In

particular we must all now call on our national governments to support

the dropping of Section 3.4 from the Codex General Guidelines on Claims.

There is no comparable industry on the planet where the

manufacturers of a product are legally prevented from telling their

customers the true facts about their products, especially when those

facts are supported by many thousands of scientific studies.

Therefore, unless and until Section 3.4 of the Codex General

Guidelines on Claims is altered in such a way as it permits claims

that food can prevent, alleviate, treat, or cure disease, the true

properties of dietary supplements will always be censored by the

regulators. If Section 3.4 were dropped, however, then dietary

supplement manufacturers would gain the same rights in advertising

their products as are currently enjoyed by their pharmaceutical cousins.

Once one understands this, it can easily be seen that the FDA, the

Federal Government, and governments across the globe will oppose the

scrapping of Section 3.4 every step of the way, because doing so would

in time dramatically reduce the income that they receive from the

issuing of drug licenses and taxes on pharmaceutical company profits.

But in the name of progress, and for the future of healthcare on

planet earth, scrap it we must.

Where are our taxes going?

An elderly uncle of mine in the UK was recently telling me how he

had been unable to get a doctor to come out to see his wife when she

had suffered a mini-stroke one evening. Thirty years ago, he reminded

me, it would have been possible to get a doctor to come out right

away. Clearly then, despite the fact that within a couple of years the

UK government will be spending around £100 billion annually on its

National Health Service (NHS) the quality of healthcare that UK

citizens receive is decreasing year by year.

Why is this so? Quite simply because along with the rest of the

Western world, the UK NHS is being crippled by the cost of paying for

outrageously expensive pharmaceutical drugs. The fact that much of

this money is being spent on unnecessary, ineffective, and even

harmful treatments - when safer and more effective natural therapies

are already known to exist borders upon insanity. As such, the

scrapping of Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on Claims

would also free up billions of dollars of taxpayers' money and

circumvent the bankrupting of our healthcare systems. And this is

before we even begin to consider the further savings that would ensue

from increased numbers of consumers actively engaging in preventative

healthcare via the consumption of dietary supplements.

Risk-analysis, or risk-benefit analysis?

There is yet another aspect to all of this however. Section 3.4 is

also the reason why our regulators engage in risk-analysis assessment

of dietary supplements instead of in risk-benefit analysis, as under

this clause the benefits of dietary supplements other than the

prevention of simple deficiencies are not supposed to exist. Once

Section 3.4 was removed from the Codex General Guidelines on Claims

however, there would be no reason not to engage in proper

benefit-analysis; and the well-documented beneficial properties of

dietary supplements would finally be out in the open for all to see.

From this point onwards therefore we must all be absolutely

certain where we stand. If we want to defend our access to dietary

supplements and achieve real health freedom we cannot stand idly by

and hope that others will do it for us.

The scrapping of Section 3.4 of the Codex General Guidelines on

Claims would be a major step in the right direction, and it is up to

us all to demand that it comes about. Please therefore write to your

senators and congressmen, as our future access to truthful health

information now depends in no small part upon this next big step.

If you wish to contact the Author:

Paul Anthony Taylor

paulandpolly

Tel: +44 (0)1325-466361

Cell: +44 (0)7903-73834

Posted at November 5, 2004 12:26 PM | TrackBack

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