November 14, 2007
Today was the final day of deliberations for the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU). Tomorrow is a day off for the delegates who get to slog around in the cold, gray and wet German November (it snowed a bit today, mixing in with the rain for a fun walk back to the meeting hall after lunch!). While the delegates slosh around (or take the guided tour of German underground bunker cities designed for residence during a nuclear war – I kid you not!) the CCNFSDU Secretariat will take the discussion and turn it into a final report. Then delegates get 1.5 hours to examine it and the final session of the meeting is held where there is usually blood on the floor by the time the session is finished as delegates fight to have their positions included in the report if the CCNFSDU power elite does not want them there or fight to correct what their contributions have been altered into.
At the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) in Rome this past July, in fact, the Swiss delegation was so peeved about the report and its abuse of their position that they fought comma by comma, word by word, for several hours (overtime, of course) to get things the way they wanted them. So these final sessions are always fraught with numbing tedium interspersed with food fights. The whole thing would be pretty interesting (and occasionally entertaining from an anthropological or political science point of view) if the matter were not so serious and of such consequence to so many people on the global stage. If you have been reading the Natural Solutions Foundation email Health Freedom Alerts (which you can sign up for at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org) or have read, for example, the Codex 7 Point Summary (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=157) you know that Codex is the international Food Code and that it serves not the needs of the needy or even the average consumer, but the multinational interests which profit from industrialization and globalization of the world’s food supply: Big Pharma, Big Chema, Big Biotech, Big Agribiz and Big Medica. Countries, especially the developing ones, mistakenly look to it for a level of safety and technical guidance on which they can base their own food laws and codes, erroneously believing the propaganda it puts out repeating endlessly that the purpose and impact of the Codex is protective and will enhance health and food safety through international trade and domestic regulation.
In fact, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Codex is dangerous, deceptive and the very unequal playing field of the very rich countries and the multinational corporations whose interests they represent at Codex and elsewhere on the global stage.
Consider India: India is the world’s second largest country with a population of 1.2 billion people. She has a huge land mass and, like many developing countries, has a vast gulf between the affluent and the poor. The affluent include the burgeoning middle class, the obscenely wealthy. ” India’s middle class constituted less than 10% of the population in 1984 and 1985, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). Since then, it has more than tripled, but is [as of 2001 it was]still less than 20%. [It was projected in 2001 that] India’s individual purchasing power will climb from $2,149 in 1999 to $5,653 per person in 2020 — and to $16,500 in 2040. (Global Currents, http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2195)
But the number of people living in slums in India, Asia’s fourth largest economy, has more than doubled in the past two decades. According to the Indian Junior Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Kumari Selja, urban slum dwellers rose from 27.9 million in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001 – the latest census data available.
India regularly asks for help from Codex, and particularly the CCNFSDU, which deals with food for special dietary uses, on setting standards for cereal based foods for children who are starving and seriously underweight. India, supported by many African and Asian countries, including, for example, Benin and Thailand, repeatedly states that the problem there is not reducing calories for children’s food (which occupies CCNFSDU’s focus when it deals with items like how to implement the World Health Organization’s much neglected Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (http://www.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA57/A57_R17-en.pdf)
but finding internationally acceptable ways to increase the calories, protein and other nutrients available to save the lives of their millions of starving children.
Year after year this concern is raised by India when the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) and CCNFSDU deal with calorie and sugar restriction in foods for infants and children (and decide, year after year, not to do the right thing. Sugar is left in baby food and weaning foods despite its health risks (including habituation for its young consumers), dangerous additives are permitted (like dangerous artificial colors, preservatives, artificial sweeteners which cause brain cancer, for example, and mono sodium glutamate). And year after year, nothing happens to help India set international standards to protect its starving children from supposedly calorie and protein enhanced foods which are, in fact, neither or which do not provide necessary nutrients, calories, protein, etc.
Consider: There are 146 million children in the developing world under the age of 5 who are underweight and more than half of them live in South Asia. Out of these 146 million babies, toddlers and preschoolers (assuming that they might some day go to school), 106 million of these dangerously underweight children live in 10 countries and 57 million of these starving children live in India Undernutition, according to the World Health Organization Report (2002) if the underlying cause of 60% of all deaths in children under 5 years of age (this figure was endorsed by Lancet in 2003). And, of course, the UNICEF publication “Progress for Children, a Report Card on Nutrition, No. 4, May 2006” says definitively that “the world must alter its priorities in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing child under nutrition by half in 2015”. By the way, I believe firmly that the international organizations like UNICEF, WHO, FAO organizations are deeply flawed and, at some upper stratum, may be directly involved in highly dangerous social culling policies. But, like Codex, they are composed primarily of armies of good men and women doing good work, or trying to, while, unlike Codex, they often produce highly useful and informative documentation of the problems which the world faces.
One of the tricks that Codex uses is to create meaningless standards on the basis that they pertain “to the general population”, not to any single group in order to make sure that the apparent underlying goal of mandating under nutrition for the global population (while proclaiming just the opposite, of course) is achieved. If you recall that Codex functions as, in essence, a pharmaceutical and chemical marketing strategy, and that healthy people do not buy many drugs, this makes good sense. That is why, in our opinion, nutrients are restricted as if they were toxins (through phony science like “Risk Assessment” and the types and levels of available nutrients (such as the European-banned boron and vanadium which Dr. Grossklaus, who lives in Europe, admitted that he is taking to help heal his bone injury) to levels so low that they cannot aid anyone’s health very much but do make sure that people are good customers for Big Pharma and Industrialized Illness Care (IIC).
There has been an ongoing struggle in CCNFSDU to introduce meaningful nutritional levels through the adoption of Nutrient Reference Values (NRVs) which would tell consumers all over the world how much of each nutrient, micro or macro nutrient, they should aim for. At least that was the intent of South Africa’s years long work on the topic. You may remember that in 2005, at the CCNFSDU meeting in Bonn, Germany, when the South African Delegate attempted to present the results of a several-year long Working Group to establish these NRVs “to promote optimum health” she was rudely and stunningly cut off by Dr. Grossklaus with these memorable words: “Codex is not about health. Codex is about trade. It would be nice if Codex could provide nutrient levels for health, but it is about trade, not health!” He then refused to allow her to proceed with her report (on which she and the other members of the Working Group had been working for years and instructed her to go back and redo the NRVs and bring them back next year! South Africa declined and Korea took over. During the presentation and discussion of the NRVs this year, Korea did not rouse the ire of the Chairman since it dutifully presented the principles, not the content, of the NRV standard. BUT the NRVs were declared to be “for the general population” and “for labeling purposes only, not for health or intake guidance”.
Here’s what that means:
NRVs will be listed on every package of food in international trade (and in domestically compliant countries). Consumers will see that this food provides x percent of their daily requirement of a particular nutrient and will, quite naturally, assume that this requirement applies to them. What they will not know is that the amount of the nutrient has nothing at all to do with their needs as a healthy man or woman, a pregnant woman, a man with HIV, a post menopausal woman, a 4 year old child, etc. They will not know that the NRV is derived from a process which took assumptions about a mythical ‘average expectable global diet’ without any reference to genetic, gender, environmental, health status or other specifics and set those values so low that, through the process of Risk Assessment, the nutrient in question might keep an average expectable global body alive, but certainly will not support health under any stress at all, let alone “optimal health”.
In the ladies room, while washing our hands side by side I spoke to the African delegate who invited me to mail her my comments before each meeting so that she could speak them since I cannot and the only “Health Freedom” observer group admitted by Codex does not do so either. I took the opportunity of clean hands and a quite room to say the following to her:
“Could you please explain to me”, I said, how it works that health claims for foods are strongly discouraged because, as stated earlier today in the meeting, ‘health claims on foods give the consumer the false impression that those foods confer a nutritional benefit'” [False? that’s why the claim is there: to tell the consumer that the food confers a nutritional benefit – REL] “but NRVs, which every consumer in the world will assume pertains to them when they read the food label, are to be derived from an amalgam of population statistics, where they exist, or from ‘probabalistic statistics’ [I swear: that is the term of art here in Codex for making up data! -REL] and ‘corrected’ by Risk Assessment to make sure that the nutrient levels do not exceed some mythical ‘Upper Safe Level’ which does not promote health?” She looked at me for a long time and then slowly said, “It doesn’t work. That makes no sense at all. I had never thought about it before!” Then we got into a long discussion about the real game of Codex and I handed her our updated Nutricide DVD (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=156) with the added section on how the “Codex Two Step Process” works to allow countries to protect themselves from the deadly and irrational standards and guidelines of Codex and from the World Trade Organization’s trade sanctions. I also gave her a hard copy of the Codex eBook (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=220)which shows how the Codex Two Step Process can be applied, in this case to the deadly Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (ratified by Codex July 4, 2005, Rome). So Codex is about trade, health claims would give people the idea that certain foods were good for them so must not be allowed without significant scientific agreement, (a standard which foods, which are safe, cannot meet and which the US FDA does not require drugs, which are dangerous, to meet) and NRVs are for labeling only and are derived from somebody’s guess about what the global average expectable person might need without any intent to provide health information or guidance.
Whew! What did the CCNFSDU body do? It fought over whether these NRVs should be produced for vitamins and minerals including global average expectable children from 6 to 36 months or just for global average expectable adults. The compromise was to produce a request for New Work that would go to the CAC and then the new NRVs, the ones that do not promote health but trade, would be produced for adults, following which, years and years down the road, they would also be produced for global average expectable children from 6 to 36 months. Consumers can rest assured that trade, if not their health, will someday be
enhanced by having meaningless information on the labels of their prepared food. What a way to go, Codex. Protecting the health of consumers, as mandated by your mandate:
The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.
http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp
Maybe tomorrow we can talk about the proud announcement of the Chair of the Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL), Dr. Ann McKenzie, that the CCFL’s contribution to the implementation of the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (which CCFL and CCNFSDU have been mandated to implement) was to set up a committee to standardize the names of foods internationally! Now that should certainly make a difference to the folks in the world dying from a contaminated food supply rich in sugar and saturated fats, artificial flavors, colors and pesticides, veterinary drugs and so forth, don’t you think?
We could also talk about the fact that, not to be outdone, despite lots of what seemed to me like snide and contemptuous references to the Global Strategy during the meeting (and at last night’s pleasant social event for delegates) by the Dr. Grossklaus, the CCNFSDU decided that it had already fulfilled its requirement to implement the Global Strategy since they had sent a letter on the topic last year!
What support for the needs of the developing world! But, then, most of them are pretty poor and have no money to buy drugs. Do you think…….? You don’t suppose……?
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
