The FDA would also like to harmonize our dietary supplement laws with the evolving international standards set by Codex, thus branding therapeutic nutrition as dangerous and risky and needing to be sold by Big Pharma or removed from the market altogether (if it competes with a blockbuster category of drugs). Codex is planning to use the same proteomics and biomarker technology that will be used by the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative to remove therapeutic dietary supplements from the international market and force their policies on America, thereby superseding the sovereignty of American law on threat of trade sanctions. The FDA fully supports draconian Codex guidelines to regulate dietary supplements and is working with the Germans to concoct technology to brand nutrients as drugs.

Will Americans be able to maintain their nutritional freedoms in the face of pressure coming from both, international and domestic agencies?

It appears that the problem may no longer be only American - there is an international trend of using "precaution" to brand nutrients as more dangerous than the pharmaceutical drugs that are killing hundreds of thousands every year.

To counter the trend, we may have to look at its origins: a conservative view of nutrition rooted in certain European nations that never had a culture of nutrient-mediated prevention and healing, coupled with a view that the only remedies for good health are pharmaceutical drugs.

Research and education will be essential to meet the challenge. Research to find and better define the effects of nutrients in prevention and healing, education to bring the conservative Europeans up to speed on how useful nutrients can be in prevention and maintenance of good health.

With food supplements, we have an extremely cost effective and very safe tool to better public health.

Why not use it to its full extent?

As a friend recently said, Europe has really no need for all these complicated regulations. The Community has a principle - the free movement of goods and services - which would be quite sufficient on its own to ensure a working internal market. That means people could determine whether to use supplements to stock up on nutrients and to what extent they want to do that. The Germans and the French could buy their supplements in England or the Netherlands, if they weren't locally available. But apparently some governments believe they have to control every last aspect of our lives, and the EU bureaucracy seems to agree.

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How the European Union is becoming the world's chief regulator

(Original article in The Economist)

A VICTORY for consumers and the free market. That was how the European Commission presented this week's ruling by European judges in favour of its multi-million euro fine on Microsoft for bullying competitors. American observers had qualms. Would a French company have been pursued with such vigour? Explain again why a squabble among American high-technology firms ends up being decided in Brussels and Luxembourg (where Euro-judges sit)? One congressman muttered about sneaky protectionism and "zealous European Commission regulators". It certainly seemed zealous of the competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, to say that a "significant drop" in the software giant's market share was "what we'd like to see".