Dr. Ron Paul / FDA Has Blood on Its Hands

[Guest guest]

The press does not want to cover this man. You have to learn of him on

he web. Please do so - he is the only hope I have seen for this country.

 

http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi72.html

 

The FDA Has Blood on Its Hands

 

by Bill Sardi

 

Congressman Ron Paul (Texas), running for President these days, is

more than an anti-war candidate; he has launched his campaign with the

introduction of legislation in the House of Representatives that is

likely to gain him plenty of recognition and unarguable public

support. Congressman Paul, not a government expansionist by any

measure, has introduced legislation that would rein in the Food and

Drug Administration's absurd restrictions regarding health claims for

dietary supplements.

 

Lest we forget, passage of the Dietary Supplement Health & Education

Act in 1994, which staved off efforts by the FDA to designate dietary

supplements as drugs, was buoyed by more letters to Congress than for

any other prior issue facing the nation. Americans don't like

government snooping into bedrooms, messing with their guns, and

certainly not restricting their access to vitamin pills.

 

For years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal

Trade Commission (FTC) have continued to censor and engage in

heavy-handed attempts to restrict access to supplements and

educational information for Americans, even when courts have ruled the

public has a right to information about dietary supplements and should

judge the merits of health claims for supplements for themselves

rather than having the FDA make such decisions.

 

The Health Freedom Protection Act

 

The bill, H.R. 2117, the Health Freedom Protection Act, would stop the

FDA from censoring truthful claims about the curative, mitigative, or

preventative effects of dietary supplements, says Scott Tips of the

National Health Federation, a Monrovia, California-based organization

that is leading the charge behind this legislation.

 

In regards to this issue, it's easy to see why Congressman Paul has

said enough is enough, and puzzling why other Congressman haven't

lifted a word in protest to the FDA. A primary example of FDAs absurd

policies can be seen in the recent debacle between cherry growers and

the agency.

 

FDA picks on cherry growers

 

It began in 1999 when a peer-reviewed report in the Journal of Natural

Products, published by the American Chemical Society, the world's

largest scientific society, concluded that tart cherries may relieve

pain better than aspirin and many other anti-inflammatory drugs. It

turns out that consumption of about 20 cherries reduces inflammation

in a similar manner as aspirin or Cox-2 inhibiting drugs without the

lethal side effects of gastric bleeding or vitamin depletion

associated with these drugs. The molecules in cherries, called

anthocyanins, work to reduce inflammation at ten times less dosage

than aspirin. [Journal Natural Products 1999 Feb; 62(2): 294–6] Pills

that provide concentrated anthocyanins would make it even easier to

consumers to achieve these health benefits.

 

When cherry growers began to cite this scientific study, the FDA

followed by sending a warning letter to 29 companies that market

cherries, threatening regulatory action if they did not remove the

scientific information regarding the anti-inflammatory properties of

cherries from their websites. The FDA declared cherries to be " drugs "

once health claims for a disease were associated with the product.

 

Bob Underwood, who sells capsules containing concentrated cherry

paste, was quoted in an Associated Press story in 2006 as saying: " We

have the government telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables,

and we have the U.S. Department of Agriculture funding some of these

fruit studies, and now we have another arm of the federal government

that says you can't use the research. " But the problem is much worse

than government censorship. A more foreboding problem lay ahead.

 

Lives could have been saved

 

While the FDA was threatening cherry growers, it was giving approval

to a drug maker for a new type of COX-2 inhibiting anti-inflammatory

drug that claimed it was safer than ibuprofen or aspirin. The FDA also

permitted this new prescription-only anti-inflammatory drug to be

advertised on television, even though long-term safety data was not

available. As it turns out, this drug wasn't any safer than aspirin

and the FDA took no subsequent action against the drug maker that

submitted misleading preliminary safety data in its application for

FDA approval. This anti-inflammatory drug went on to cause thousands

of side effects and was associated with the deaths of an estimated

20,000 Americans, mostly due to mortal heart attacks. An FDA

" whistleblower, " Dr. David Graham, had to alert the public to this

problem.

 

If only the public knew about the anti-inflammatory properties of

cherries, thousands of Americans would have not met their early and

avoidable demise. The FDA has blood on its hands regarding this issue.

It should have elected for cherry stains instead.

 

The FDA doesn't disagree with the scientific information about

cherries, but it does say that cherries have not been recognized as

safe and effective when used as labeled. Do we need a double-blind

placebo-controlled study to prove cherries promote health?

 

Jeffrey May, editor of CCH Trade Regulation Reporter (the " publication

of record " in the antitrust and trade regulation fields), quotes Rep.

Ron Paul as saying there is a need to stop " federal bureaucrats from

preventing Americans from learning about simple ways to improve their

health. "

 

Burden of proof on government

 

The proposed Health Freedom Protection Act would place the burden of

proof on the FTC to establish that an advertisement for a dietary

supplement or a dietary ingredient is " false and misleading and that

the advertisement actually causes consumers to be misled into

believing to be true that which is demonstrably false. "

 

The FTC has required " supplement manufacturers to satisfy an

unobtainable standard of proof that their statement is true, "

according to Rep. Paul. The bill also requires that the FTC warn

parties that their advertising is false and give them a chance to

correct their mistakes.

 

National Health Federation contact information: P.O. Box 688,

Monrovia, CA 91017 USA; 1 (626) 357-2181; Fax 1 (626) 303-0642;

Website; E-mail.