Protect your right to Natural and Bio-available Vitamin B-6

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Click below to send an email to the FDA.

Alert:

Protect Your Right To Natural and Bio-available Vitamin B-6!

April 6, 2010

Human

beings cannot live without vitamin B-6. It is also important for the prevention

of cancer and the prevention and treatment of seizures, anemia, mental

disorders including schizophrenia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other

conditions. Its effect on carpal tunnel can seem almost miraculous.

A natural

form of the vitamin, Pyridoxamine, was recently yanked off the market by the

FDA. Why? Because a pharmaceutical company, BioStratum, wanted sole use of

pyridoxamine in a drug, a drug which may or may not ever appear. The company

filed a so-called citizens petition and the FDA agreed, notwithstanding

protests from ANH-USA, other organizations, and thousands of citizens. You

might ask: how can Pharma take a supplement off the market and claim exclusive

use of it as a prescription drug? The FDA does not presently feel obligated to answer

this question.

Unfortunately,

this isn’t all the bad news about vitamin B6. All forms of B-6, natural

or synthetic, must be converted to P5P, another natural form, for the body to

use it. Another drug company, Medicure Pharma, wants sole use of P5P and so has

petitioned the FDA to ban its use as a supplement as well.

Medicure

has yet to market a drug made from P5P, but wants the ban to take place now.

And never mind that any individual unable to convert synthetic B6 to P5P would

have to rely solely on Medicure’s product to stay alive.

How does

Medicure think it can get away with this? Its petition states rather candidly:

“Pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs must be protected from

companies that may seek to market the ingredients in those drugs as dietary

supplements. The marketing of such products has the potential to undermine the

incentive for the development of new drugs because many people may choose to

purchase the supplements rather than the drugs.”

This is

not of course a case of supplement producers creating a product to compete with

an existing prescription drug. It is just the reverse. P5P, the natural and

bioactive form of B6, has existed in food for as long as there have been humans

and has been available as a supplement for years. Medicure seems to be saying:

If it seems profitable, let’s just turn a critical vitamin, one essential

for human life, into a drug, make it available only by subscription, and mark

up the price. This is truly outrageous.

The FDA

has not yet responded to Medicure’s petition. We have asked you in the

past to send a message to the FDA and Congress protesting Medicure’s P5P

grab, and the time has come to send some more messages. So if you haven’t

sent in a message to the FDA and Congress yet, or even if you have, please send one today.

 

http://www.anh-usa.org/alert-protect-your-right-to-natural-and-bio-available-vitamin-b-6/

 

While we

are discussing Vitamin B6, here is the latest scientific report. An analysis of

13 U.S., European and Asian studies of vitamin B6 and colon cancer, conducted

from 2002-2009, has been published in a special edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Studies of the range of B6 doses found that vitamin B6 taken in higher doses

reduced the risk of colon cancer by 21 percent. In one study, Dr. Susanna

Larsson and her colleagues at Sweden’s

National Institute of Environmental Medicine reported an inverse relationship

between the intake of vitamin B6 or pyridoxine and the risk of colon cancer.

Dr. Larsson linked the effect to bloodstream levels of pyridoxal-phosphate

(PLP), the main active coenzyme form of vitamin B6. Pyridoxal-phosphate is

also known as pyridoxal 5-phosphate or (as we referred to it above) P5P.

Don’t

let the FDA take away our access to the natural and most bioavailable form of

B6, P5P. Please take action now.