Natural Solutions Foundation
The Voice of Global Health Freedom™
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
New Action Item: please take now!
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4252
The Natural Solutions Foundation has, as usual, led the health freedom community in sounding the warning about the fake food and supplement “safety” bills pending before the Senate of the United States. Our supporters have heeded that warning and delivered well over one million messages to Congress demanding NO fake safety bills and insisting that Congress provide protection for our supplements and natural remedies, not Codex HARMonization. Read about that recent history and how PUSH BACK is working – thanks to you through your activism and your dissemination of this information. http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=4608
But we are not finished, not by a long shot. Others believe that the current partial victory for our Push Back efforts is enough for us to stand down, focus on other things. They may be well intentioned but, as we said when Sen. John McCain’s S 3002, a veritable poison pill for supplements, was abandoned, we were pleased, but we, as the old saying goes, “were not home yet”. Well, once again, we are not home yet. S. 510 must be defeated if we are to protect clean food, fend off total industrialization of our food supply AND protect our supplements.
And Now, Here Are the Details
Well, the Senate has reacted to your PUSH BACK yet again, and yet again, has given us dangerous half-way measures at best. WE SAY THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
Take the Action Item above; ask everyone you know to tell Congress: “NO! to the forced industrialization of our food supply!”
Back in 2007 when Sen Ted Kennedy gave Big Pharma his dying bequest… what it wanted most, more power — as Dr Ron Paul puts it, “to abuse” — we warned everyone that the FDA could not be trusted. That was when we had been told by various politicians – and even some misguided “health freedom groups” that it wasn’t “necessary” to have protective language added to the Kennedy “FDA Enabling Act” because, after all, they solemnly (and naively) assured us in DC, dietary supplements were not even mentioned in the bill. We said we didn’t trust FDA and that we wanted Dietary Supplements and Natural Remedies protected from enhanced FDA power. We persisted – YOU persisted – and we prevailed in the conference committee, with the help of hundreds of thousands of your emails, in keeping Section 1011, which exempted, and thus protected, dietary supplements, in the bill.
Nonetheless, within a year or so of that bill passing, FDA used its new Section 301(11)* power to ban interstate commerce in any food substance that had ever been studied for medical use in order to ban Pyridoxamine, a non-toxic form of vitamin B6. What gives the FDA the power to do this? Can you imagine why the Congress of the United States would believe it had Constitutional authority to deny food substances to any free people? Perhaps to perpetuate a Pharmopoly (pharmaceutical monopoly…)? Corruption and bribery, campaign funding and favors, perhaps? From the largest single lobbying force in the United States, perhaps? Conflict of interest, perhaps? Hmmmmm…
So in January of 2009, Pyridoxamine was banned. That’s right, banned. A natural, non patentable, safe and historically proven vitamin was banned to the American public. Despite its long history of safe use as a dietary supplement, it was not protected by section 1011 because, FDA says, no one “proved” it was grandfathered under DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Eduction Act of 1994)… and just because the substance was on the Old Ingredients List didn’t prove anything, blah, blah, blah… (Substances on the Old Ingredient list had always been considered grandfathered in under DSHEA, which holds that nutrients and supplements are to be treated as foods and, as such, cannot be limited or banned unless they are unsafe.)
The Other Shoe? Wait No Longer!
The FDA, which Dr. Rima refers to as the “Fraud and Death Administration, is about to drop the other shoe and ban more forms of B6. This time, the Phamopoly intent is blatant, since the “Citizens Petition” by the drug company involved actually states:
“Pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs must be protected from companies that may seek to market the ingredients in those drugs as dietary supplements. The marketing of such products has the potential to undermine the incentive for the development of new drugs because many people may choose to purchase the supplements rather than the drugs.”
Go back and read that quote again. The enormity of this is literally mind boggling! Instead of tossing this absurdity out, the FDA is, as always, playing the tune its Big Pharma masters demand.
So what does this have to do with the Fake Food Safety Bill, S.510?
Everything. You may recall that your million+ email PUSH BACK recently defeated Sen John McCain’s attempt to force Codex Alimentarius dietary supplement restrictions on us via his fake dietary supplement “safety” bill, S.3002. That bill died one month and one day after it was introduced… a real PUSH BACK record!
But, as we predicted and feared, attempts were made to include the worst parts of S.3002 in a revised effort to get S.510 passed. We saw that one coming, although, once again, others who should have known better, told us we were crazy. Once again, we asked you to message Congress through the Natural Solutions Foundation Action Item. Many hundreds of thousands of emails later, it appears that S.510 will be amended to “protect” DSHEA products. That sounds good ….
But That’s Not Enough.
Here’s what IS good enough: We want natural remedies and holistic techniques (like Holistic Ear Candling, for example) and all natural, local, community, family and farm food production protected too… better yet, DEFEAT S.510!
Please use this revised Action Item to make sure the Senate knows we are not happy… yet! If you have taken action on this issue, take it again since the Action Item has been revised to reflect the newest ploy on the part of the food destroyers. Please take it once for each member of your household and then pass it along to everyone you can reach with a simple note saying that this issue is of grave importance to you and you hope it will be to the person you are sending it to as well. Ask them to take action in the same way and then forward it to their circle of influence in the same way.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26714
And thank you; your PUSH BACK works! You are defending both health and freedom through your action.
As always, we need your support to continue this struggle to secure your health freedom everywhere it is challenged!
Please make your recurring tax deductible donation here: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189
Yours in health and freedom,
Ralph Fucetola JD
Counsel and Trustee
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army, Ret.)
President
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
PS * With referenced to Section 301(11) — where Congress violated our Constitutional and human right to freedom of choice in accessing any non-harmful food substance an individual chooses — our position is simple: this tyrannical power must be repealed by Congress (with apologies to We the People) or voided by the Courts!
Natural Solutions Foundation The Voice of Global Health Freedom(TM)
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
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The article below makes clear a part, but only a part, of why Senator Harkin’s misnamed “Food Safety” Bill, S. 510, must be defeated. Another part, of course, is that, as we predicted, the worst, most anti-supplement-and-nutrient parts of Senator McCain’s absurd and disastrous S. 30032 have been added into the Harkin bill. So McCain is off the hook, Harkin’s bill would destroy small farms, including virtually every family or personal, non-corporate farm. For what? To give the gift that keeps on giving: the entire food supply of the United States is, with the passage of this bill, handed over to Big Agribiz, the giant multinational consortium that is already producing most of, and contaminating most of, our food.
Big Agribiz is perfectly happy to use the shoddiest of practices to produce the dirtiest of food: they know that enforcement and penalties are meaningless. This bill will make them more so.
They are happy to use the cheapest of contaminated ingredients, artificial colors, GMO and chemical vat derived flavors, ingredients, neurotoxins like MSG to provide beef flavor instead of beef to provide flavor, import cheaper and cheaper food ingredients to make sure that their profit is maintained, and devil take the hinder most. And we, the eating public, are of course, the hinder most.
Big Agribiz is perfectly delighted to source GMO food which will give us cancer, create autoimmune diseases, render us infertile, give us lethal allergies never seen before and perfectly OK with the fact that these “foods” are laced with extraordinary, and increasing, levels of herbicides, pesticides and other chemicals that have the very real capacity of wreaking havoc with our health and with our DNA, damaging the genetic heritage of not only our environment, but our human ancestors for all times to come.
Big Agribiz could not be more pleased with the bill before the Senate. Indeed, they wrote it, lock, stock and barrel. So far, the concerted and tireless actions of you and me have kept this horrific bill from moving forward in the Congress. Its companion bill has, in fact, passed the House. But the Senate action has been delayed by one thing: our continuing pressure.
I am just as opposed to this bill as I was when it was first introduced into Congress many months ago. I am, not that I think about it, more incensed because, with the addition of the McCain bill provisions, it is actually worse than it was then. So I know that you will want to keep up the pressure. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death to do so. The life of clean food farming, including your personal clean food production is at stake here and, with it, your life. Clean food = clean health. Poor food = poor health. This is so simple that it hardly bears repeating. In fact, it is the very premise, standing on its head, upon which Codex Alimentarius is based.
Big Pharma, at least the German genocidalist version of Big Pharma, the part controlled directly by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., decided that this simple truth was the crux of a huge profit margin for them while they finished what the Third Reich had failed to do: cleanse the world’s populations of the “useless eaters”, those who, like you and I, live “lives not worth living”. They decided to degrade the world’s food supply so that they could make sure that their potential clients were sick and dying of what the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization labeled, in their Joint Special Report in 2003, http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/publications/trs916/en/, “the PREVENTABLE, NON COMMUNICABLE chronic degenerative diseases of under nutrition: cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, diabetes and obesity” [emphasis added – REL]. These conditions are, by the way, not only the leading cause of death in the developed world, but the leading money makers for the illness care industry.
Now Big Agribiz, which uses enormous amounts of chemical inputs to produce degraded food, both animal and plant, and which IS also Big Chema, as well as Big Biotech and Big Pharma, wants to bring this global Codex-compliant degradation home to the US all at one fell swoop, to make sure that none of us is healthy, none of us can escape their system and none of us has any choices.
We believe this is worth pulling out the stops for so that we do have the option to source clean, unadulterated food, produced by people of principle, including YOU in your own garden.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director,
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
PS: The Natural Solutions Foundation will be attending the very significant Codex Committee on Food Labeling at the beginning of May. Please make your generous donation now to assure that we can be there to bring you a first hand view of this important meeting by clicking here, http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189.
Food Safety in the US: We’re on Red Alert
Andrew Kimbrell
The United States once had one of the safest food systems in the world, but now, 70 million Americans are sickened, 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die from food-borne illness every year. It is a sad fact: since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed, injured or hurt because of our lack of a coordinated food safety system than by terrorist acts that challenge our Homeland Security system.
The culprits in this assault on American wellbeing aren’t shadowy terrorist figures, but rather, they are what most consumers would identify as wholesome — not harmful — foods. Peanuts, lettuce, pistachios, spinach, hamburgers sold to Boy Scout camps, peppers, tomatoes, and pepper-coated sausages are among the foods that have sickened and killed Americans in just the last few years. Our children are most at risk from these food threats, with half of all food-borne illness striking children under 15 years old.
The Bush administration constantly claimed it was protecting Americans from potential security threats, yet it completely failed to protect the public from the clear and present danger of deadly food. Due in part to that administration’s cuts in funding and staff, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently inspects less than 25% of all food facilities in the U.S. More than 50% of all American food facilities have gone uninspected for five years or more. During President Bush’s last term, regulatory actions against those companies selling contaminated food to Americans declined by over a half (Office of the Inspector General: FDA’s Food Facility Registry. Report: OEI-02-08-00060, December 2009).
[Note, while essential food inspections are being decreased, FDA appears to be using its recent 23% budget increase to attack Dietary Supplements, Herbal and Natural Remedies, including such harmless relaxation modalities as Holistic (Ear) Candles! REL]
The result is tragically predictable. Large processing facilities, which now mix foods from across the country and the world, are not being inspected. Illnesses caused by contaminated foods, which could be prevented with proper government oversight, are instead causing the hospitalization of hundreds of thousands and the deaths of thousands of Americans. Again, the victims are, disproportionately, our children.
The tens of millions of victims of food-borne illness represent only one segment of the casualties from our failure to require safe and nutritious food. Because of lax regulation of agricultural chemicals, many of the fruits and vegetables that should bring us health and nutrition are instead laced with dangerous pesticides, dozens of which are known carcinogens. Much of the food marketed to our children and served in their schools are confections brimming with trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup; these contribute mightily to the epidemic of obesity in the young and heart disease and diabetes in our older populations. Under pressure from agribusiness, our federal agencies and legislators continue to commercialize genetically modified foods with no safety testing and no labeling for consumers. And, despite the strong potential of health hazards, food made with new, nanotechnology-based chemicals are getting waived through to the market, without any independent testing at all.
Clearly our food safety system is broken and needs a complete overhaul. With the continuing string of food contamination scandals, even Congress has begun to pay attention. The Food Safety Enhancement Act (HR 2749) was passed by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2008 and takes some steps in the right direction. It gives more authority to the FDA, restoring some of its power to conduct food inspections and strengthen oversight.
However, it’s far from perfect. Bowing to pressure from agribusiness, lawmakers have exempted livestock producers and any other entity regulated by the USDA from the new regulations of both this act and its Senate companion, the Food Safety Modernization Act (S.510). In fact, members of Congress were so committed to the interests of big industrial meat producers that they also prohibited the FDA from “impeding, minimizing, or affecting” USDA authority on meat, poultry, and eggs. As a result, these bills contain the stupefying provision that no attempt by the FDA to combat E. coli and Salmonella will be allowed. These bacteria are the most common causes of deadly food-borne illness and are found in products contaminated with animal feces. Since January 2010, over 850,000 pounds of beef — mostly from industrial feed lots — has been recalled due to E. coli O157:H7 contamination. The members of Congress have essentially protected the interests of corporations who are bad actors, while condemning the public to continued sickness from these contaminants.
Another major problem with both bills is that they begin with the flawed premise that all producers and processors of food — whether massive corporate farms or small family farms — are equally at fault for our broken food safety system. New food safety legislation should target the largest causes of food-borne illness. These include concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), water and field contamination due to manure lagoon leakage, and industrial processing systems, not small farms.
The “one size fits all” regulatory approach in these bills fails to take this disparity into account. It instead places an undue and unsupportable burden on family farms, small processors, and direct marketers of organic and locally grown food. These have not been contributors to the contamination events which have caused major food-borne illness outbreaks, a fact that was acknowledged by FDA Deputy Director Michael R. Taylor at a July 2009 House Oversight Subcommittee on Domestic Policy hearing on Ready-to-Eat Vegetables and Leafy Green Agreements.
It is unconscionable that factory farms would get a pass under the proposed legislation while family farmers, who often struggle to stay in operation, are held to stringent, unnecessary and potentially bankrupting requirements. Small operators would bear the brunt of large fees that generate the revenue sufficient for the overall food safety program to operate. Food safety regulation at the farm and processing level must be appropriate to scale and level of risk.
Fortunately, some Senators are addressing the gaps in their bill. Perhaps the most critical action so far is that of Sen. Tester (D-MT), who has introduced an amendment to exempt small-scale and direct marketing farmers and processors, who are already well regulated by local authorities.
However, most problematic is that the legislation in its current state perpetuates the regulatory tangle that is our food safety system. Arcane mixes of regulatory authority between the FDA, USDA and EPA make for dangerously inefficient government. It is long overdue that we establish a separate and effective government agency dedicated to food safety. We need to separate out the ‘Food’ part of the Food and Drug Administration and consolidate all authority under a new Food Safety Agency.
We did this for Homeland Security; we should also do it for food security. After all, it is the lack of food safety in this country that is the far more imminent threat to all of us, our families and, especially, our children.
Andrew Kimbrell is the Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kimbrell/food-safety-in-the-us-wer_b_532948.html