| On December 6th, the AER bill (calling
for regulation of food supplements) PASSED the Senate on the consent calendar
and was sent over to the House. A CHANCE STILL EXISTS THAT it could be heard or
tacked on to another bill. It is all happening very fast.
You would take a stand AGAINST this bill if you believe:
- You value the right to choose dietary supplements and nutrients as a part of your
personal health protocol
- Dietary supplements are nutrients
- The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act is ALREADY
IN PLACE to regulate food supplements and there is no need to regulate
them as risky drugs (and create a regulatory burden that would make it
cost prohibitive to produce them)
- You want supplements to continue to be treated as foods
and not synthetic medicines
- That the government has the burden to show harm before
they put more onerous regulations on food supplements
Our "Two
Cents":
The pharmaceutical industry has a vested
interest in eliminating/regulating food supplements that provide safe, natural,
inexpensive alternatives to prescription drugs and their multitude of side
effects. This bill is driven and backed by the multi-billion dollar
pharmaceutical industry which kills an estimated 200,000 Americans per year
according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (the
most prestigious medical journal in the world). This number does not
include the hundreds of thousands who suffer illness or serious injury from drug
side-effects. Recently, MSNBC highlighted that 700,000 people per year are
rushed to the ER due to side-effects of commonly used drugs.
Comparatively, prior to its ban, Americans took
more than two billion doses annually of the supposedly deadly
supplement, ephedra, yet the American Association of Poison Control Centers
documents only one death per year from wrongful use of ephedra.
(If the media frenzy has caused you to think differently about ephedra,
consider this... even though the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) audit
of the FDA's case against ephedra concluded that the synthetic pharmaceutical
drug "ephedrine", and not ephedra, resulted in the reported
adverse effects, ephedra was still banned by the FDA banned in 2006.)
The
pharmaceutical industry recognizes it cannot profit from natural remedies
because they cannot patent a substance that is found in nature. They also
recognize that consumers are becoming more educated about the side effects,
limitations and dangers of pharmaceutical drugs. We are choosing natural
remedies to accomplish better health outcomes and that threatens Big Pharma
pocket books. We believe this bill is intended to squelch the competitive
risk that natural remedies and whole food supplements present to the
pharmaceutical industry.
We also believe that the FDA should be
dealing with the travesty of deaths and serious side effects caused by
prescription drugs and leave dietary supplements to exist within already over-rigorous
regulatory structure. As pointed out by Shane Ellison, author of the very
informative book, Health Myths Exposed, "An estimated 90% of American
Adults are nutrient deficient. We are not dying from supplements but
instead, from lack of supplement use. Most Americans deny proper
diet and nutritional supplementation and instead embrace FDA approved drugs to
stay healthy. Looking at the health of our nation, this model is clearly
not working."
| 
