June 10, 2012   |   0 comments

National Health Federation president Scott Tips on Codex Alimentarius and the threat to health freedom. Increasingly draconian restrictions are being placed on vitamins and other food supplements at a time when a growing number of people are beginning to take health care and illness prevention into their own hands. Avoidance of institutionalized healthcare is likely to increase as long as corporate influence on government continues and the medical establishment holds the interests of pharmaceutical corporations and other related businesses over those of the individual.

Background
The Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), based inRome,Italy, is an international organization jointly created by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations. The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Use (CCNFSDU) is responsible for Dietary Supplements and Medical Foods and is one of some 27 separate Codex committees. The CCNFSDU meets annually and the National Health Federation is a Codex-recognized organization with the right to attend and speak out at these meetings. Established in 1955, the National Health Federation is an international nonprofit, consumer-education, health-freedom organization working to protect individuals’ rights to choose to consume healthy food, take supplements and use alternative therapies without government restrictions.

The purpose of Codex is to provide a forum to facilitate global trade in foods and promote consumer food safety by developing science based standards and guidelines for use by member countries. Codex guidelines and standards are automatically implemented by the General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs (GATT) of the WHO and become binding for all international trade among GATT signatory countries.

The National Health Federation opposes the current Codex member states who wrongly believe that consumer health will be enhanced by: (1) denying that dietary supplements can benefit normal, healthy people; (2) incorrectly defining dietary supplements as only those vitamins and minerals that the body cannot manufacture itself; (3) restricting the upper-limit amounts of vitamins and minerals, particularly by referring to currently-crude and archaic medical beliefs about nutrients; (4) restricting any physiological benefit information for consumers; (5) restricting the lower-limit amounts of vitamins and minerals that may be consumed by individuals; and (6) creating ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ lists of dietary supplements.

The current direction of Codex is off course and is unfortunately driven by a statist and elitist mentality that thinks it knows what is best for consumer health and protection. This mindset comes from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s kind of ‘brave new world’ thinking that elevated central planners into a form of God on Earth. That kind of out-dated thinking has caused more misery, death and disease than can possibly be imagined.

With the doubling time of knowledge constantly accelerating, mankind cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of getting stuck in health standards established in the 20th Century while new health knowledge and products are discovered almost daily. The best way to ensure such progress and advancing health is to keep the planners and bureaucrats from straitjacketing dietary supplements with medievalist thinking and restrictions.

National Health Federation US
National Health Federation UK

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