Many of us use vitamins and mineral supplements to get healthy or stay healthy. There is a new international group that is working to limit access to supplements and to make some or all of them available only by prescription. The excerpt below is from an email I received from Ana Micka, President-Citizens for health, who can be reached at: info@healthactioncenter.org
July 3, 2005. Dr. Ed Scarbrough, US Codex Office administrator and administrative leader of the US Delegation to the 28th session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, today told the delegation at its pre-meeting session that the Codex Commission Executive Committee had endorsed the vitamin and mineral guidelines recommended to it for adoption by its Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU). The endorsed guidelines call for upper intake limits based on toxic chemical risk assessment, prohibit health claims for foods, and urge consumers to restrict their intake of nutrients to the foods they eat. The endorsement of the guidelines by the Executive Committee virtually ensures their adoption by the full Commission at its July 4 meeting.
Dr. Scarbrough commented on Chinese and other Asian country desires to have greater flexibility, based on unique dietary habits, to add other categories than vitamins and minerals to the guidelines, and Australia’s “perennial” desire to restrict the guidelines to countries that treat vitamins and minerals only as foods. These arguments, he reported, did not move the Codex Executive Committee away from endorsing the guidelines. Nor did Canada’s lack of support for the guidelines. Canada argued that “given the differences in diets, food supplies, attitudes, and consumption patterns around the world, such guidelines were best left to national governments.” This argument failed to move the Executive Committee to recommend delay or rejection of the guidelines.
I sure hope this doesn't happen but I have seen nothing about it in the press. I've sent a letter to my Congressman and Senators (NY).
