Below we re-post Natural Solutions Foundation Trustee Ralph Fucetola JD’s post election commentary, from his Vitamin Lawyer Health Freedom Blog:
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
President Obama and Health Freedom: Change?
http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/president-obama-and-health-freedom.html
It is truly an historic moment, with the election of a candidate for president of the United States who identifies himself as a member of a minority ethnic group. One therefore hopes that president-elect Obama will be open to hearing dissenting and alternative opinions about issues such as healthcare freedom of choice. Surely, an administration built on the idea of “change” should be willing to listen to advocates of change.
We are, however, concerned that candidate Obama offered very little about issues that are of concern to health freedom advocates. The campaign chose not to respond to the Health Freedom Presidential Candidate Questionnaire — although several of the Principled Third Party candidates did so; you can see their generally pro-health freedom responses at: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=1303
We could not find any major media mention of vaccine mandates directly by the winning candidate, but in September, when Sen. Obama and the New Jersey governor passed a demonstration of pro-health freedom parents, some of whom were attending a fund raiser in an upscale community with the politicians, there was a report from the fundraiser,
“I’m afraid Barack Obama was asked by someone at the fundraiser if he supported the parent’s right to choose to vaccinate, and he said he did not!”
The governor, however acknowledged,
“We get more e-mails and letters on this than any other issue other than tolls.”
http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/09/obama-and-corzi.html
On another touchstone issue for health freedom advocates, Genetically Modified products foisted on the public without truthful labeling, the new President may not take an entirely pro-industry position. In a pre-election report we learn,
“[Obama b]elieves GM plants are beneficial with tests for environmental and health effects and regulatory oversight.”
The requirement for testing, while falling short of truthful labeling, would be a change from current policy which “deems” GM products safe without third party testing.
On issues such as international harmonization, the “new world order” advisers surrounding the president-elect suggest that it may be difficult to focus any attention by the new administration on this important issue. We can expect the US Codex delegation to continue to have a free hand in supporting the international agenda of the “bigs” – Big Finance, Big Agra, Big Pharma, et al. Codex Alimentarius (the world food code) must continue to be a focus of the movement.
And finally, last year, when we were in Washington several times to help educate Congress about health freedom, we were not able to discuss with Sen. Obama’s staff the important issue of divesting the FDA of its food authority, so that food (including dietary supplement) regulation would not remain the neglected step-child of the FDA’s focus on supporting Big Pharma. However, discussions with other left/liberal legislative aids at that time, including people who will be allies of the president-elect in Congress, suggests a basis for pursuing the divestment issue.
Divesting the FDA may therefore be one health freedom issue that will have some “play” in the new Congress. What will be necessary, of course, will be for several Democratic members of Congress to be willing to co-sponsor a divestment bill. And for hundreds of thousands of Health Freedom Mouse Warriors to demand an end to FDA abuse of power.
The prospects for healthcare freedom of choice are mixed in the coming period.
Advocates of health freedom will need to redouble their efforts, especially to protect our children from vaccine mandates and to prevent ever more HARMonization of our health freedoms with international restrictions.
Divesting the FDA of its misused food authority appears to be a policy for which we may have some hope for real change…
Neither Candidate for the office of President of the US is committed to controlling, labeling and eliminating GMOs.
That’s bad news for the environment and bad news for us.
But the situation is not hopeless. Take South Africa, for example.
Despite years of force feeding GMO staple foods, including white corn, which most of South Africa’s poor population lives on, the South African Government, despite a great deal of backing and filling, has finally made mandatory labeling of all GMO food and ingredients mandatory.
Why can’t we do the same? Why can’t we rouse enough outrage and pressure to force the US to retreat from its 1992 position, instituted upon the signing of an Executive Order by then-President George Bush Sr., making GMOs administratively (and pseudo-scientifically) “substantially equivalent” to non modified foods.
Science, on the other hand, makes it clear that nothing could be further from the truth. If you check out the GMO Files in this blog, you will find abundant – and very scary – data that makes it clear that these “foods” are not food at all, but industrial toxins.
Right now there are three laws before the US House of Representatives, sponsored by Rep. Denis Kuchinch (D, OH) which would require safety testing, labeling and scientific evaluation of all GMO crops and products.
Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25920) to support those bills and ask your Congressional members to become both supporters and co-sponsors of this vitally important legislation.
In the meantime, I hope you will join the Natural Solutions Foundation’s vigorous and active No-GMO-Forum (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-genetically-modified-foods/join) and become part of the community of action to stop being fed industrial toxins instead of food, all with the connivance of the next POTUS (President of the United States).
And don’t forget to give generously to support the Natural Solutions Foundation as we keep health freedom free! Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to make your recurring, tax exempt donation and here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130) to order the best coffee in the world, our Valley of the Moon(TM) shade grown, chemical free coffee – ground or whole bean ~ A Little Bit of (NON GMO) Heaven in a Cup(TM) ~ while you support health freedom.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
US election impact on GM food
By Sarah Hills, 31-Oct-2008 [www.nutraingredients-usa.com]
Genetically modified food companies should be paying particular attention to the results of next week’s presidential election as they could face tough times ahead, according to a Soil Association report. Click here () to read more.
Consumers, food manufacturers and farmers are increasingly moving away from GM products, the new study called Land of the GM-Free? How the American public are starting to turn against GM food, claimed.
At the same time the UK environmental charity said 87 percent of Americans want labels on food telling them whether Genetically Modified (GM) products have been used or not.
The SA added: “These developments, combined with the possibility of Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s pledge to support legislation to label GM food if he should get elected, suggest that GM companies are in for a difficult few years in the USA.”
National Solutions Foundation and www.HealthFreedomUSA.org always bring you urgent information about your health freedom and practical steps you can take to make a difference.
“Breakthrough casualty” (aka “collateral damage”) is what happens when a poorly tested, new drug or device (or novel GMO product) is publicized in the mass commercial media in ways that are not truthful and are misleading. Here are Action Steps To Help Prevent Yourself and Your Loved Ones From Becoming A “Breakthrough Casualty”
Today, the biggest causes of “breakthrough casualties” are the very issues that Natural Solutions Foundation has championed: GMOs, degraded organic standards, forced vaccinations and drugging, toxins (like pesticide residua, irradiation free-radicals, and the like) in the food chain, regulatory failures…
Tell Your Legislators Compulsory Drugging, Including Vaccination is NOT OK!
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=21833
Join the Natural Solutions Foundation’s No Forced Vaccination Yahoo! Forum
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-forced-vaccination/join
Support the Child Medication Safety Act So Schools Cannot Hold Parents Hostage For Refusing To Medicate Their Kids
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=18970
Sign the Historic Tiburon Declaration Protecting Against Forced Vaccination
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=460
Join the free Health Freedom eAlerts Distribution List
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187
Make Your Tax Deductible Contribution to the Natural Solutions Foundation to further our work.
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
Breakthrough Casualties…
You’ve heard of “Breakthrough Bleeding,” right? That’s when someone starts to bleed in spite of the fact that the body, or a drug, should be keeping them from doing that. Well, there’s another “Breakthrough” problem, and we are all vulnerable to it: “Breakthrough Death” which occurs when the latest medical “breakthrough” is so dangerous, so poorly tested, so poorly understood and so rapidly embraced by the ever-compliant media (“Ask your doctor is it’s right for YOU”) along with the ever time-pressured and sheepish medical practitioner that you, or someone you love, winds up dead or damaged because of a poorly understood, but hastily taken-up “Medical Breakthrough”.
The article posted below questions the wisdom of new medical “wisdom”. Indeed, the bone-fields of Medicine are littered with discarded ” breakthroughs”, too hastily approved, too gleefully adopted, too poorly tested. Of course, the graveyards of medicine are littered with the patients who blindly rushed to line up for the newest alleged “advances” and trusted the “wisdom” of the usually-well-meaning, carefully preselected and obedient sheep in MD’s clothing who blithely make their livings by being there with the new whatever-it-is-this-time. For example, in my educated opinion, the new chemotherapy which turns out to damage your heart and not work any better than any of the other ineffective conventional cancer approaches and, like every form of conventional chemotherapy, is a leading cause of NEW cancer in long term survivors; or the new antibiotic that turns out to cause your body to stop making any blood cells, red or white, or causes you to go deaf, or damages the dental integrity of your unborn child; or the new vaccine that turns out to cause healthy young girls and women to die or develop life threatening conditions; or the vaccine overload that turns so many happy young families into tragic families coping with the vaccine injury called autism, asthma, ADD/ADHD and a host of other names.
You get the idea.
What you may not know yet is that “fast track” approval for drugs and especially vaccines means that even the woefully inadequate safety assurances used by the FDA are shunted aside. And whether a drug, device or vaccine has been fast-tracked or not, that FDA approved-whatever is not deemed safe until after Phase IV Clinical Trials are completed and evaluated. And you may also not know that the FDA review committees and advisory committees, panels and boards are filled with people who have stocks, bonds, shares, patents and other direct financial conflicts of interest in the very products they are regulating, or seeking to evaluate and forbid if dangerous. Good system? For them, maybe. Just look at the state of American health and the trillions of dollars made by the illness care industry using things that make you sick and kill you although they have been through Phase I, II and II Clinical Trials. And although these devices, drugs and vaccines are now in their much-vaunted “Phase IV Clinical Trials”
What is a Phase IV Clinical Trial? It is the voluntary reporting, over time, of adverse reactions in the public. In other words, when doctors notice that patients are dying, or having strokes or heart attacks, or getting rather more cancer than “normal” or having more life-threatening asthma attacks or other reactions and the doctors involved bother to report (and often incriminate themselves if they were the ones who gave the drug or used the device in the first place), and these results pile up and the scientists reviewing these data do not have too many conflicts of interest, and their superiors in the system do not have too many conflicts of interest (which are now officially permitted by the agencies of the US Government charged with protecting our safety), then perhaps something will happen to remove this item from sale. But usually not. I need only say the word “Vioxx” and you get the idea. Or “Gardasil” or “Avienda”.
Or core systemic corruption and inability to protect the public… you get the idea. *
We like to think that clinical trials and other strategies protective of the public when using drugs, pesticides, vaccines and other toxins are iron clad and powerful. Nothing could be further from the truth. The FDA, EPA and USDA, the principle “guardians” of public health, do not allocate their funding efficiently to do their jobs. Congressional report after Congressional report, investigative piece after investigative piece makes that very clear. But the structure of these agencies themselves makes it even more clear.
For the FDA, a large proportion of whose operating budget comes from “user fees” which Pharmaceutical companies pay to have their products approved. Those user fees mean that the FDA is the client, not the regulator, of the drug industry.
Now it looks like the food industry will be asked to pay the same sort of user fees so the food side of the house will also become a client of the industry it allegedly regulates. Wonder what will happen to small local, organic producers in that regulatory world, where only the big and powerful are “too big to fail…”
Between the revolving door policy of the FDA, USDA, EPA and other federal agencies (through which high level employees are recruited from, revolve into, and continue to move back and forth between government, academia and industry as their careers develop) and the lack of oversight allowed or engaged in by these agencies, allowing “new breakthroughs” to create “new wealth” and “new disasters”.
Read the article below by a concerned and thoughtful Mom and take the Action Steps at the head of this article to make sure your State and National Legislators know that you do not want to be exposed to compulsory vaccination, a form of compulsory drugging.
Thanks.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
–x–x–
Sometimes ‘new breakthroughs’ in medicine are too new
October 12, 2008
By Kimberly A. Brehm
Every time the medical community changes its mind and announces yet another way to care for your child, I’m amazed that my children made it out of their early years unscathed.
When my babies were young, they slept on their tummies, until the American Medical Association said the position could lead to sudden infant death syndrome. I bathed them in cool water when their fevers ran high, until I heard the tried-and-true practice could cause a seizure. And I gave them over-the-counter cold medicine when they had persistent, hacking coughs and sore throats.
Turns out that wasn’t a good idea, either.
On Tuesday, in response to concerns from medical experts that questioned whether cold and cough remedies do more harm than good to children, drug companies agreed to no longer make such medications for kids younger than 4.
Leading brands like Pediacare, Dimetapp, Robitussin, Triaminic and Little Colds no longer will continue to include dosage information for anyone younger than 4, and some pediatricians are asking the government to go further and ban such medicines for children younger than 6.
Each year, more than 7,000 children – mostly 2- and 3-year-olds – make a trip to the emergency room because of problems with over-the-counter cough and cold medicines. They usually have symptoms such as hives, drowsiness and unsteady walking. The Federal Drug Administration in 2007 pulled over-the-counter cough and cold medications for children younger than 6 to weigh their risks and effectiveness, but it could take another year or more before a final decision is reached.
Since it seems like every decade or so the medical community reverses previous decisions on particular medicines and medical treatments, it’s made me wonder when I can trust “new breakthroughs” and “innovative advances.”
A reversal about something like a cough suppressant – once seen as a benign drug – is the exact reason I have not yet allowed my teen daughters to be vaccinated with the HPV vaccine. It’s too new and hasn’t been researched enough for me to give my approval and feel comfortable.
In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration OK’d Gardasil as a vaccine against four strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer. Since then, more than 8 million girls ages 11 to 14 have been given the vaccine, and some states are considering making the shot mandatory for school enrollment, similar to other immunizations.
When Gardasil was approved a few years ago, my oldest daughter was 11, the ideal age to begin the shots. But I hesitated, thinking about other “new and improved” medicines that later proved to cause harm.
Remember when pregnant women were prescribed Thalidomide for nausea, then it was discovered to cause miscarriages and birth defects? Or when vaccines routinely included mercury, until that too proved to be dangerous? Or how about Fen-phen and Ephedra, which were supposed to be safe weight-loss drugs, and women began dying? In the 1990s, infants were given the rotavirus vaccine, until too many babies died after receiving it, and it was pulled from the market. I could go on and on listing dozens of examples like this, including strong, antidotal evidence of a link between immunizations and autism.
Thousands of parents of autistic children, including my brother and his wife, are firmly convinced their child’s autism was caused by vaccines and no amount of denial from drug companies would convince them otherwise.
And now, three years after young girls starting getting the Gardasil vaccine, it’s being investigated. There have been more than 9,000 complaints of serious ill effects filed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including blood clots, genital warts, paralysis and death.
The CDC said the deaths are not linked to Gardasil, but who knows what they’ll discover after further investigation? I personally am not willing to let my daughters be guinea pigs for the fairly new vaccine when even the CDC agrees the vaccine responds differently to each individual’s immune system and should not be mandatory for school participation.
“The overall effect of the vaccines on cervical cancer remains unknown. The real impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer will not be observed for decades,” the New England Journal reported in August. “With so many essential questions still unanswered, there is good reason to be cautious.”
When the wrong decision could cause your child harm – or maybe even result in death – it would be negligent not to be cautious. And when the medical experts change their minds every few years on what’s good and what’s harmful, it’s hard to make the right decision.
http://www.southtownstar.com/news/brehm/1213902,101208brehm.article
–x–x–
Please remember the six Action Steps you can take at the beginning of this posting.
(c) 2008
-x——————-x-
Footnote:
* Less than a year ago, a government study of the FDA concluded:
1) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base has eroded and its scientific organizational structure is weak.
2) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific workforce does not have sufficient capacity and capability.
3) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its information technology (IT) infrastructure is inadequate.
4) FDA does not have the capacity to ensure the safety of food for the nation.
5) The development of medical products based on “new science†cannot be adequately regulated by the FDA.
6) There is insufficient capacity in modeling risk assessment and analysis.
7) The FDA science agenda lacks a coherent structure and vision, as well as effective coordination and prioritization.
8) The FDA has substantial recruitment and retention challenges.
9) The FDA has an inadequate and ineffective program for scientist performance.
10) The FDA has not taken sufficient advantage of external and internal collaborations.
11) The FDA lacks the information science capability and information infrastructure to fulfill is regulatory mandate.
12) The FDA cannot provide the information infrastructure support to regulate products based on new science.
[From: the November 2007 Report of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology, FDA Science and Mission at Risk]
The following questionnaire is being sent to the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates of the two governing parties and also of the major Third Party Candidates, Ralph Nader (independent), former Congresswoman McKinney (Green Party), Rev. Chuck Baldwin (Constitutional Party) and former Congressman Barr (Libertarian Party). We will keep you informed of their answers… or failure to answer. You have the right to know the candidates’ positions and Natural Solutions Foundation is here to make sure they answer. Please copy and send this to the candidates of your choice.
———————-
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
2008 Presidential Campaign Questionnaire
The Natural Solutions Foundation has several hundred thousand people who have opted in to our email list and millions more who read our information when those people forward it to them. Our constituency has serious health care concerns and we would like to share your position on each of these issues with them. The following questions are being submitted to each of the presidential and vice presidential candidates. The natural solutions foundation will compile your responses and inform our supporters and their contacts about your answers (or lack thereof) to each question. In addition, we will issue a press release announcing the results. These questions cover the four issues our supporters have told us concern them the most.
The Natural Solutions Foundation, founded in 2004, is an international NGO (non governmental organization) active and registered in several countries and is a not for profit 501(c )(3) tax exempt organization in the United States.
We are the largest health freedom organization in the world. The mission of the Foundation is to discover, develop, demonstrate and disseminate natural solutions to the problems facing us and threatening our health and freedom, achieving and maintaining a healthy self, community and world. To do this, we seek to educate the President, Congress and decision makers as well as the general public.
1. International Harmonization of Health Freedom Policy: Codex Alimentarius
a. Do you support vigorous enforcement of the anti-harmonization act, 19 USC 3512, which forbids harmonization of our health freedoms with international restrictions, such as those represented by Codex Alimentarius (the world food code) despite US leadership at Codex in violating that statute domestically and globally?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
b. Do you support the health freedom of speech principles unanimously enacted by Congress with the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) and currently threatened by both the Codex position on health claims and the attempted FDA restriction on truthful, scientifically supported health claims and information?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
c. Do you support HR 2117, “The Health Freedom Protection Act,†introduced by Congressman Ron Paul MD, that would mandate FDA approval of dietary supplement health claims for which scientific evidence exists?
2. National Policy Regarding Labeling Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
The FDA takes the position that GMO products are deemed safe without testing, following a 1992 Executive Order to that effect and therefore holds that there is no reason to required truthful GMO labeling and that “GMO Free†labels will not be allowed. According to a New York Times / CBS poll in June 2008, 87% of Americans want GMO labeling and over fifty percent do not want to buy such products.
a. As president will you tell the FDA to stop preventing truthful GMO labeling?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
b. Do you support Congressman Kuchinich’s bill, HR 6636, “The Genetically Engineered Food Right To Know Act,†That would require mandatory labeling of all foods that contain or are produced with GM material?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
3. National Policy Regarding Safety of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
The FDA takes the position that GMO products are deemed safe without testing following a 1992 executive order to that effect and is prohibited from requiring or examining any safety studies after the initial, preliminary studies by the patent holders. Independent studies in the US and elsewhere make it clear that both the short term and long term effects of GMOs may be hazardous to unborn children, babies, and adults and may have disastrous impact on fertility and health.
a. As President will you tell the FDA to require, under the Precautionary Principle, rigorous scientific evidence of GMO safety?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
b. Do you support Congressman Kuchinich’s bill, HR 6637, “The Genetically Engineered Safety Act,†would require that GE foods follow a food safety review process.
Yes [ ] no [ ]
4. National Vaccination Policy: No Forced Vaccination
We do not believe that mandating the uninsurable risk of vaccination is ever justified, that it violates constitutionally guaranteed rights and we support the broadest medical, religious and philosophical exemptions from all mandated drugging.
a. As President, will you stop all federal funding for mandated vaccinations imposed on American families and will you stop all federal funding to states which impose such forced drugging and vaccinations on the people in their jurisdiction?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
We are deeply concerned that the states have been induced by the Federal CDC to pass legislation which we believe is both ill-advised and unconstitutional which forces citizens to submit to medical procedures which they may not agree with or accept on pain of felony charges and penalties, or loss of access to government schools or other government activities.
b. As President will you refuse to implement those presidential emergency actions necessary to impose the emergency medical powers acts passed by nearly all states, which make refusing mandatory vaccination or drugging a felony act once the governor of a state has declared a pandemic to be in effect?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
5. National Policy Regarding Pandemic Flu Preparations
We are concerned that the current pandemic flu preparations may actually bring about the very pandemic we all seek to avoid.
a. Will you appoint a blue ribbon committee including at least equal numbers of physicians who oppose the use of weaponized vaccinations and anti-virals to review all current federally funded pandemic influenza research, ensuring that it does not (like the Federal anthrax program) become the source of the disease it is alleged to be established to prevent, study the serious possibility that the avian Flu is non-pathogenic in its natural form and may have been turned into a serious disease-producing virus in laboratories, and release your committee’s findings openly and transparently to the American people?
Yes [ ] no [ ]
Thank you for participating in this Candidate Questionnaire. Please send all responses, including your additional comments, to dr.laibow@gmail.com with “Candidate Questionnaire†in the subject line.
Yours in health and freedom,
Natural Solutions Foundation Trustees
Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine (USA, ret)
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Ralph Fucetola JD
November 10, 2007
I have been sitting in the CCNFSDU (Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses) Working Group on Gluten – Foods for about 1 hour. We are struggling, as the CCNFSDU has been for over 16 years, to define what a gluten – free food is, whether we are talking about single ingredients, how to measure it and what happens if a standard cannot be reached. There already is a gluten -f foods standard under Codex, by the way, which was adopted in 1981. By the way, right now Basil Mathioudakis of the European Community and Barbara Schneeman of the US FDA are having a food fight: the EC wants to keep out foods that do not usually have gluten (cucumber for instance) while the US (supported, naturally, by Canada) wants to include the possibility of all foods, whether formulated for that purpose or not.
At the last Codex meeting, for which we had pre-registered, we found ourselves confronted by armed guards who did everything they could to keep General Stubblebine and me away from the Delegates at the meeting using intimidation, threat and other weird ways of behaving when you consider that these are meetings open to everyone. So we did NOT pre-register for this meeting in order to see what would happen if we used this strategy. Well, what happened was really interesting. First of all, there are no armed guards in evidence, which is quite a nice touch, to be sure.
Second, when we came up to the registration table When we walked in this morning (NOT having pre-registered) to see if we would be sequestered from the Delegates if we arrived without pre-registering for the meeting. What happened was that Mr. Georg Mueller, the head of the CCNFSDU German Secretariat, saw that we were setting up our computers in the meeting room and insisted (politely, but insisting, none the less) that we not sit in the room on the main floor where the meeting was being held because it was too full and was, indeed, fully booked. Take a look at a picture of the “full room” DURING THE MEETING: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/images/1-7-2008%204-21-27%20PM_0001.JPG
Hours into the meeting, by coffee break time, there is still no agreement over whether a food like cucumbers (naturally gluten free) should be included in the deliberations or only a product which has been rendered gluten – free by processing. During the 30 minute break, a representative of an African “friendly” comes up to me to seek me out and tell me that she is glad to see us here and I give her an update on the “reasoning” used by the US for prohibiting – actively forbidding – the labeling of Genetically Modified (GM) foods (often called “Franken Foods”) at the February meeting on Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods (Oslo, Feb, 2007): that both FDA and independent research shows conclusively that consumers will reject GM foods if they know that their food IS GM. Since the FDA has decided that GM food is equivalent to non GM food (ADMINISTRATIVELY, NOT SCIENTIFICALLY, THAT IS, SINCE THE FDA REQUIRES NOT A SINGLE SHRED OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE THAT GM FOOD IS SAFE OR THAT IT IS IDENTICAL TO NON GM FOOD – REL) consumers would be making a mistake if they rejected GM food. Because of that, the FDA feels that telling consumers the truth about GM foods would be FALSE AND MISLEADING!
Of course, she was dumbstruck at that bit of wacky (and potentially lethal) news about the US and its GM policy.
So you can imagine my surprise when Barbara Schneeman did something that I actually felt I had to congratulate her on. You see, ordinarily the EU follows right along behind the US in what appears very much like a choreographed script. Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Brazil have their lines in the script, too. Only on things which will not shape world markets is dissent in evidence between these countries.
Today, the discussion was raging about whether a gluten free item had to provide less than 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten only or whether there could be low gluten and reduced gluten products at somewhere between 20 ppm. Meanwhile, the EU Delegate, Basil Mathioudakis is still taking another position on gluten free foods from the US: he says he wants to protect industry and their products. That’s when Dr. Schneeman got my attention: she gave a passionate and powerful plea for actually protecting the consumer, NOT products! Yikes! I nearly fell of my chair!
In fact, I was so astonished that, at the next coffee break I went out of my way to talk with her. As I approached her she visibly flinched (you may remember that she was so upset by one of my [accurate] press releases that she was on the verge of tears when we spoke about it at a pre-Codex Committee meeting some time ago. She did not like being quoted in a way that menaced the health of large numbers of people although my quote was fully accurate). She tensed as I began to speak but then got much more comfortable when I congratulated her on her passionate defense of the interests of the consumer. In fact, I went on, if the FDA had that attitude about protecting people in all ways was its work, I would be able to return to the practice of drug free medicine! She and I then had a nice little chat. Her response to my congratulations on her position was to state that it was the FDA’s goal to protect the interests all the time. I agreed but said that they had quite a way to go. I also said that it was nice to be able to thank her for something that she did and pointed out that I did not publicly criticize EVERYTHING she does. Then I told her that I would write to our supporter base, the largest in the health freedom movement by a factor of at least 15 fold, and let them know that she had done something we could approve of and wished her may more such successes!
But don’t be fooled. The FDA is NOT about consumer protection, either on the drug side of the house or the food side. That is one of the reasons why it is so important to push back against them in their degradation of the food supply and permission to market drugs that they KNOW are deadly. The FDA wants to make it illegal to share information about the benefits of food by intentionally confusing health claims with scientific papers and other information (remember, this is consistent with the definition of “advertising” that the FDA bulled through Codex Committee on Food Labeling and then brought home as their ‘Guidance on Health Claims’) and forbidding the dissemination of health benefits information. You can take action, you know, to stop this gag rule on health freedom by taking action to support Ron Paul’s excellent Health Freedom Protection Act at https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/hq/email/summary.jsp?email_blast_KEYS=1077464
On a cultural note, tomorrow, on November 11 at 11:11 AM the women of Bad Neuenaur will storm the city hall and take over the reigns of power for one day. Gosh! If they can do it, why can’t we? Please, today, ask three friends, neighbors, whatever, to go to the Natural Solutions Foundation website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, and sign up for the secure Health Freedom E-Alerts.
We are more powerful than we know! It just takes exploring the reality of how power is wielded to get that power pumping for us!
Yours in health and freedom from the Codex Meeting on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org