Alchemist Lab

According to recent articles on the Alliance for Natural Health USA (whose motto is “Good Science & Good Law”) Web site, Senator John McCain has withdrawn his support for Senate Bill 3002 (which he had co-sponsored) after hundreds of thousands of messages poured in opposing his action.

It’s reported that Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the two health champions of the Senate, will introduce a new bill that will protect supplements.

This new bill, called the “Dietary Supplement Full Implementation and Enforcement Act of 2010″ (DSHEA) will regulate dietary supplements rather than trying to throttle the industry. McCain may end up as a sponsor of this new bill by including the provision that requires the FDA to notify the Drug Enforcement Administration if any supplement contains anabolic steroids. This is a reasonable proposal and satisfies his biggest beef which was the steroid scandal in baseball.

Another very dangerous piece of legislation, the FDA Food Modernization Act (Senate Bill 510, also known as the “Food Safety Bill”) has been altered to exempt dietary supplements from the language that would have harmonized American regulations to the Codex Alimentarius.

The Codex Alimentarius was developed to establish international food safety standards and to regulate ingredients in food products. There exists apprehension that the Codex standards are moving in the direction of the very restrictive European rules on supplements and that if America harmonizes with the Codex it would be the basis of severe restrictions on dietary supplements here in the U.S.

The House version of the “Food Safety Bill” has already passed. We need to make every effort to make sure the House version does not become law. Senators Hatch & Harkin are also the leaders in the battle to modify Senate Bill 510 so that it doesn’t restrict your access to supplements, and they deserve our support.

Additional Resources about the “Food Safety Bill” and Dietary / Nutritional Supplements:

The Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-USA) is an organization spearheading this battle for retaining your rights to use the nutritional supplements that form the basis for a natural approach to health care.

Read more in the following two articles about this issue at the ANH-USA Web site:

“ANH-USA Victory! Supplements Are Exempted From Codex Language in Food Safety Bill” (Published April 13, 2010)

“New Senate Supplements Bill Expected” (Published April 20, 2010)

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Codex Alimentarius at Wikipedia

On February 4, 2010, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) introduced a Bill (S 3002 IS) to Congress that if passed will both drive up the cost of dietary supplements and restrict access to them. This bill, co-sponsored by Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakot), originated from McCain’s interest in the baseball steroid scandal, whereby some companies sold illegal steroids under the guise of dietary supplements.

CLICK HERE to read the proposed Bill.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) already has the power to outlaw supplements, evidenced by its ruling related to Ephedra. The problem with this bill is that it sets up a potentially arbitrary process and makes it too easy to ban supplements. It would give the FDA the authority to ban supplements as well as to set potencies.

Currently the FDA already requires all manufacturing companies to maintain records of any serious adverse reactions to its products. This new bill would require that all “non serious adverse events” also be reported to the federal government.

One obvious fault to requiring that non-serious adverse reactions, including headache, be recorded is that it’s often not possible to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the supplement and – for example – a headache, which might have been caused by something else. If in our Dragon Heart Healing Arts clinic we prescribe a supplement and the patient gets a headache, how do we know that the remedy that we prescribed caused that particular headache, especially if the patient was prescribed and began to use more than one supplement at the same time? How do we even know that there was a connection between the supplement and the headache at all, which could have been caused by any number of other factors?

This bill, if enacted, would enable pharmaceutical companies to file to obtain reports on adverse OR non-adverse reactions using the Freedom of Information Act, and use this information to petition the FDA to restrict a particular supplement. This bill would also make it easier for large for-profit pharmaceutical companies to file use patents on supplements and convert them into drugs.

Fortunately, right now America is, more free than much of the world in terms of consumer access to potent (highly effective) vitamins and supplements. Much of this is due to the DSHEA Act of 1994 which governs current supplement law. This freedom is under considerable pressure from pharmaceutical companies with a profit motive, and also by some well-meaning politicians with specific concerns about protecting the public against against some specific harmful supplements, but whose proposed laws would also unduly and unnecessarily impact your ability to benefit by using supplements that are not only not harmful, but quite helpful.

In a related issue, there is an international effort under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization) WHO to regulate the food supply, which includes herbs and other nutritional supplements. I’ll be writing more about the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for food code) in a future article.

CLICK HERE to visit the Life Extension Action Alert Network for readers who wish to learn more about the Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA) and to to take action on this threat: