Your Right to Use Vitamins Is in Jeopardy, Senators Push Regulatory Assault on Vitamins

HUMAN EVENTS ^ | 09.03.03 | Dr. Julian Whitaker

[Coleus]

Your Right to Use Nutritional Supplements Is in Jeopardy

Senators Push Regulatory Assault on Vitamins

by Dr. Julian Whitaker

Posted Sep 3, 2003

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We need to take action, and we need to take action now. There is a movement in Congress to push through legislation that would restrict your freedom to use nutritional supplements, and could destroy the nutritional supplement industry?and, in the process, endanger your health.

Here is the problem. Reacting to the hysteria over ephedra, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D.-Ill.) has introduced S. 722, cosponsored by colleagues Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.), Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.), and Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.). The bill gives unprecedented power to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove nutritional supplements from the market. Here’s how:

• It calls for a reporting system for adverse reactions to nutritional supplements.
  
  
• It empowers the FDA to act on a single adverse reaction report and immediately take the product off the market while it is being investigated.
  
  
• In addition, the FDA could force the manufacturer to undergo prohibitively costly safety analyses of the product, similar to what is required for new drugs.
  
  Here’s a possible scenario. Mrs. Jones in Somewhere, USA, is taking a supplement containing vitamin C. One afternoon she has some diarrhea. She faints, falls in her bathroom, hits her head, and is hospitalized with a head injury.
  
  Believe it or not, an adverse reaction could be pinned on vitamin C. Based upon this single event, the FDA could at its discretion move to restrict sales of vitamin C throughout the entire country until an investigation proves that vitamin C did not cause Mrs. Jones’s problems.
  
  Smokescreen of ‘Safety’
  
  The bill also gives the FDA license to require supplement manufacturers to submit safety information that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, patterned on regulations required for new drugs.
  
  This is absurd. New drugs need rigorous safety testing because they are compounds that have never been ingested by human beings. The ubiquitous use and long history of safety of nutritional supplements are apparently irrelevant to the sponsors of this bill.
  
  The nutritional supplement industry arguably has the best product safety record of any industry in the country. According to Rep. Dan Burton (R.-Ind.), a maximum of 16 deaths were attributed to a nutritional supplement last year. (Excessive doses of ephedra were the suspect in the majority of these cases, and the supplement link was definitively proven in only a few of them.)
  
  Meanwhile, the FDA turns a blind eye to the 106,000 deaths from adverse effects of prescription drugs and the tens of thousands of deaths from aspirin and other over-the-counter drugs that occur every year.
  
  This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.
  
  Harmful Bill
  
  This bill is a good example of government irrationality.
  
  According to a 2002 report by Washington, D.C.,-based Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), the use of antioxidants, folic acid, calcium, zinc, and other nutritional supplements could reduce the incidence of neural tube birth defects by 70%, hip fractures by at least 20%, and sick days caused by infectious diseases by 50%?Heart disease, stroke, cataracts, macular degeneration, some types of cancer?nutritional supplements have been shown to prevent or delay all these conditions and others.
  
  Furthermore, CRN reports that by delaying the onset of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and hip fracture alone, nutritional therapies could potentially save $89 billion a year in healthcare costs!
  
  Yet S. 722 would empower the FDA to dismantle the supplement industry and prevent you from receiving the astonishing benefits that only nutritional supplements can deliver.
  
  Immediate Action Needed
  
  The only way to stop this bill is for us to flood our elected representatives and senators with so many e-mails, faxes, and phone calls that they will be forced to say no to this bill.
  
  Grassroots Effectiveness
  
  Don’t underestimate the power of such a grassroots movement. Ten years ago, Health & Healing readers were instrumental in rallying the passing of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Millions of letters were written to our congressmen and senators in support of this legislation?it generated more letters than any other issue in U.S. history. Because of DSHEA, which reduced the FDA’s power to block the production, sale, and use of natural substances, we have free access to herbs, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional supplements.
  
  An FDA Power Grab
  
  You may have read in the press that we need new laws because there is no regulation of nutritional supplements. This is simply not true. DSHEA gives the FDA tremendous regulatory power, and in fact, it already has the power to pull any supplement it feels is unsafe off the market.
  
  Yet because DSHEA also gives supplement manufacturers some autonomy, the FDA has attempted to circumvent it from day one. This agency fought hard against the passage of DSHEA ten years ago and, in a thinly veiled attempt to get rid of or amend it, has refused to act responsibly within its confines ever since.
  
  Time is of the essence. S. 722 has recently been referred to committee and may be tagged onto the Agriculture Appropriations Bill. We can and must act quickly to stop this legislation.
  
  Send a message to your senators today asking them to vote against S. 722. (See box for information.) If you’ve already done so, do it again. Tell your friends about this threat and encourage them to take action as well.
  
  If each one of you could commit to generating just a handful of e-mails, faxes, or phone calls, over a million messages would descend upon Washington. You may not realize how powerful a grassroots campaign like this can be, but our elected officials cannot ignore something of this magnitude.

  Dr. Whitaker is editor of Health and Healing, one of the country's leading health newsletters.

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[dcwusmc]

A RIGHT can ONLY be exercised by a "sane adult," as that is the only person who can be considered competent to do so. A child's rights are exercised by his or her guardian until the child is emancipated, usually at age 18, but sometimes earlier... under unusual circumstances. A person who is mentally incompetent has his rights also exercised by a guardian. However, the wise parent or guardian will allow and encourage the minor/mental patient to exercise as much as is prudent under the specific circumstance. In the case of a child, it is expected that his or her self-exercise of rights will increase as the child grows, with full exercise and full self-responsibility coming on emancipation. Your comments show the same intellectual thrust as those which might be found at DU.

[dcwusmc]

In which case you have committed fraud. An actual CRIME. Mislabelling Altoids as vitamins does come under the heading of the very real crime of fraud and misrepresentation. A PRIVATE testing lab, similar to but not unlike Underwriters Labs, could quite easily test and publish the results of any substance meant for ingestion. Your Altoids hoax might last as long as a week but I doubt it.

[discostu]

Haven't been to GNC lately have you. Check it out, the bottom of every single box in that place has a disclaimer saying that none of their claims have been verified by testing and there's no garauntee of results. Most of the pills in there are less useful than Altoids but it's not fraud because they use the disclaimer to cover their butt. Once you've used to disclaimer to undo all your promises nobody can say you promised anything and therefore you can't have broken your promises. Disclaimers are the panacea of the suppliment industry. My Altoids hoax should last at least as long as Metabolife.

[dcwusmc]

I have read many disclaimers. They are required so that the product does not come under FDA cognizance for making medicinal claims for a dietary supplement. If we did not have that unconstitutional FDA, such claims could be made and tested for veracity. Yet another "solution" from FedGov that creates many more problems than it could ever resolve.

[discostu]

They could be tested for varacity by someone other than the FDA, UL could do it as you suggested. Instead the suppliment industry remains almost entirely untested by anybody, including the companies. Disclaimers are used throughout advertising to undo promises, not just in the suppliment industry, the most famous disclaimer in history has become it's own meme: your milage may vary. That's how promises get unmade in the world of selling things to people, unmaking promises is how you avoid fraud suits. I'm not saying there needs to be a government solution for this, I'm just saying that anytime you think a fraud suit can stop a scam you need to look for the disclaimer, if there is one then no a fraud suit cannot stop that particular scam.

[Coleus]

One man's ephedra may be viewed either positively or negatively by others >>

My SIL took a supplement with ephedra in it after foot surgery since she knew that she would be in bed and at home for about 3 months and didn't want to gain any weight, not only did she not gain weight, she lost 25lbs. from doing nothing.

Many of those who died took way too much of the stuff, some people think if a little is good, more is better. They learned the hard way.