About the lawsuit, Dr. Verkerk said "This is a groundbreaking challenge to another intrusive and unwanted EU Directive ban which we aim to demonstrate has been passed unlawfully from the EU into U.K. law. We believe that it will rob the consumer of the right to buy important nutritional supplements to improve their diet and health and that of their children, as well as putting hundreds of small businesses and the livelihoods of thousands at risk. There is absolutely no justification for this ban and we aim to get it removed."

Dr. Verkerk, ANH, and their supporters are extremely concerned that this draconian measure will ban ingredients that include natural forms of vitamin E, found in wheat germ and organic bound minerals like selenocysteine, found in brazil nuts. In addition the directive aims to ban nearly all important trace elements used in supplements, including boron (necessary for bone production) and vanadium (useful in blood sugar regulation).

Especially targeted to be eliminated, says Dr. Verkerk, are high quality products made from natural ingredients, whereas synthetic vitamins and inorganic minerals, typically pervasive in multivitamin and mineral products found in supermarkets and pharmacies, will not be affected by the ban. These low quality products are the nutrient forms approved by the EU directive. In Bonn, the only multiple that we could find was Centrum, the synthetic multiple made by Wyeth Pharmaceutical company, which any hospital nurse will tell you, usually lands in the bedpan with a thud, fully intact.

Dr. Verkerk adds that another effect of the EU legislation is that many small companies who research, produce, and market safe and effective food supplements will be unable to sell them without investing huge sums of money to "prove" their safety. This is despite the fact that people have been consuming most of these food-based nutrients for sometimes hundreds of years with no known health risk.

On the Codex front, Dr. Verkerk has produced a brilliant paper to counter the attempt by Codex to devise the amount of supplements allowed to be sold on the world market based on risk analysis.2 As we have stated repeatedly, there is no risk to dietary supplements, they are safer than the food chain, yet the Codex machine pushes on trying to say they are unsafe and need to be limited and regulated. You can read Dr. Verkerk's 35-page submission to the FAO/WHO Nutrient Risk Assessment Project on behalf of the Natural Health Alliance at the link provided.2

It is the same nonsense that is happening in Canada and is soon to happen in the U.S. as regulators are turning up the heat as they spread rumors about dangerous supplements. It's time to turn to the back pages of Death by Modern Medicine and join consumer groups, write letter, and lobby your members of parliament, congressmen, and senators.

North America Must Hang Tough
In the U.S. the fact that dietary supplements are regulated under a food designation according DSHEA, which as passed in 1994, is extremely critical to both the U.S. and Canada. The priority for Americans is to protect and expand DSHEA. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that has protected food-based medicine with specific legislation. Big Pharma and its friends continually try to undo that legislation. The second focus for Americans should be to support Canada's health freedom movement. In Canada, we continue to fight for Bill C-420 to get our supplements back to a food designation. Canada and the US fought similar battles around 1994 and in 1997 Canada saved its supplements but we didn't implement legislation like DSHEA. And as we've mentioned several times on January 1, 2004 our dietary supplements became drugs by a regulatory maneuver, not a law.