ANH PRESS RELEASE

Wednesday 21st January 2009

Ray of sunlight from ANH/Irish efforts in Brussels..Is the democratic process still intact?

 .. Those of you who've been following ANH's campaign since we formed in 2002, will remember we challenged the first part of the European Commission's directive to centrally regulate food supplements. Our primary charge is that the Directive was set up to benefit the big pharmaceutical players that were trading one-a-day supplements containing largely synthetic vitamins and inorganic nutrients.
If you wanted to produce high quality, natural supplements, the sheer amount of data the European Commission wanted-given that they wanted all ingredients to be approved BEFORE going on the market-were so great that smaller companies just wouldn't be able to jump this hurdle! And, let's face it, it's only the smaller companies who are interested in truly natural ingredients and genuine positive impacts on health. Cutting a long story short, although our challenge, which was first won in the High Court in London (January 2004) and then referred to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and ruled in July 2005, didn't overturn the Directive altogether, it created some very useful clarification and narrowing of the scope of the Directive. Some of the most useful outcomes were ensuring that natural sources of nutrients couldn't be caught by this pre-market authorisation regime, meaning that they would now be considered as normal food ingredients, clarifying the legal data requirements for approvals, as well as the location of the ultimate burden of proof for lack of safety. The Court made it clear it lay with the regulator, rather than the industry, this fact being important once again because of the sheer cost of proving that something's safe!

Stage 2 of the EU plan on supplements - banning higher dose, therapeutically active supplements
The next stage of the Directive, written into the original Directive of 2002, is the imposition of a ceiling for maximum doses of vitamins and minerals in supplements across all 28 Member States of Europe. This is an initiative that will impact all supplements consumers across Europe's now over 500 million population. The big worry, is that the 'safety based' approach that they want to use to assign these maximum limits is based on dodgy science. But it gives them a justification to ban any vitamin or mineral that is used for health purposes. You see, once again, they are favouring the placebo-type one-a-day, pharmaceutical style products that abound in supermarkets and pharmacies across Europe. They want to get rid of the very best products that you find in health stores and those used by practitioners.
Exposing flawed risk assessment science is something ANH has been at the forefront of exposing for over 4 years and now we're only a month or so away from hearing what upper limits the European Commission wants to impose.
Enter the Irish Association of Health Stores petition

In December 2007 our good friends in Ireland, at the Irish Association of Health Stores, the association that looks after the 100 or so dynamic health stores in the Emerald Isle, submitted a petition against the European Commission's planned next phase of the Directive. They said it was high dose supplements that separated them from the supermarkets and pharmacies and if they were forced to only carry dumbed-down products, around 50% of Irish health stores would probably close within a year as people would have less reason to go into health stores. The worrying trend of everyone doing more and more of their shopping in big supermarkets would continue unabated and the health stores, which currently provide a massively important health support function in Ireland (particularly as many people choose to go a health store rather than pay a fee of around 50 euros to see their general practitioner) would be yet another victim of the big corporate take over of our communities and high streets.
Well, on Monday, with ANH's Executive and Scientific Director, Rob Verkerk representing the Irish Association of Health Stores in the European Parliament's Petitions Committee in Brussels, we had a win. A win for democracy, something that many had thought was long gone within the Brussels law-making system. Rather than having the petition thrown out following its oral hearing, it was kept open. And even more importantly it was referred on to the key group of European parliamentarians for their views. If they don't like it they may be able to block the legal instrument.
What we're actually calling on is the use of good science. It seems to be the most important tool we have when dealing with regulators.
You can read more detail about what happened in our joint press release with the Irish Association of Health Stores below.
Before we finish, we'd like to emphasise what an important time this is for natural health in Europe. In fact, there are more and more challenges going on in other parts of the world too, from the US, to Canada, Southern Africa and elsewhere, that are also of key significance. Please take it upon yourself to a) bring as many people as you can up to speed with what's going on. Get them to sign up on our website for our eBlasts is a great start, and b) let's all use what elements of the democratic process is left in our world.

Please write to your democratic representative, your member of parliament. In Europe it's now particularly important to communicate with your Member of the European Parliament (MEP), while in the US write or visit your member of congress. Do this now, as it's future generations that will lose out more than us.

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