Today, Saturday, April 28, 2007, the Working Group on the Proposed Draft Amendment for the Labeling of Prepackaged Food will meet in the Ottawa Congress Center, Ottawa, Canada. On Sunday, April 29, the Working Group for the Production, Processing, Labeling and Marketing of Organically Produced Foods will meet. Both meetings are a single day long each year. Both sort out thorny issues n dry as dust terms. But that dust, like the rest of Codex, contains the seeds of the future health of the planet within it. Each Working Group meets for a one day meeting held each year before the start of the Codex Committee on Food Labeling which is hosted by Canada in Ottawa annually.
After the meeting tomorrow I will fill you in on what takes place. What is going on at Codex is vitally important to your health and your planet. BUt what is going on at Codex is also going on at home, too.
Ralph Fucetola, a regulatory lawyer, has written a beautiful guest blog which follows. Please read it and pass it along to everyone in your circle of influence. It is a really important piece. By the way, Big Pharma’s agenda knows neither national borders nor compassion for the vulnerable. Senator Kennedy’s new bill shows neither sense nor respect for your rights. The FDA Guidance shows neither respect for your health nor your health freedom.
We, the people, are neither amused nor hoodwinked and are once again standing and roaring that we control our freedoms, we, not merchants and not politicians, and certainly not bureaucrats or doctors.
Here is Ralph’s Guest Blog:
A Natural Solutions Foundation Guest Editorial
www.vitaminlawyernews.com
FDA CAM DRAFT GUIDANCE INFORMATION
Docket No. 2006D-0480 – http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/E7-3259.htm
1. Guest Blog for NSF – 04/28/07
2. FDA CAM Threat Assessment – 04/26/07
3. Comments to FDA regarding CAM draft Guidance – 04/06/07
A Natural Solutions Foundation Guest Blog Entry
See: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php/?p=367
Don’t be Duped: Multiple Assaults Need Multiple Responses
Our Health Freedom is threatened again. It’s been going on for centuries,
this struggle between healers and bureaucrats. Even back in the age of Henry
the 8th the surgeons of London got a law passed effectively outlawing their
herbalist competitors by granting themselves a monopoly, and, a couple years
later, after many herbalists were brought before the courts, the King had to
intervene, obtaining Parliamentary approval for what is now known in the
Common Law as The Herbalists Charter, to protect traditional methods of
healing and allow their practice “without suit, vexation, trouble, penalty
or loss…”1 As recently as the start of the Twentieth Century, one state
Supreme Court noted, “”The state has not restricted the cure of the body to
the practice of medicine and surgery — allopathy, as it is termed… that
would be to limit progress by establishing allopathy as the state system of
healing, and forbidding all others. This would be as foreign to ours system as
a state church for the cure of souls… To restrict all healing to that one
kind — to allopathy, excluding homeopathy, osteopathy, and all other
treatments — might be a protection to doctors in surgery and medicine; but
that is not the object of the act, and might make it unconstitutional, because
creating a monopoly.” 2
Just such a monopoly was created. For convenience, we can call it the Big
Pharma Cartel. It has money and powerful friends in government – who often
play bureaucratic “musical chairs” among agencies, big companies and
universities. They use that power to harass, jail and even kill their
competitors. We honor the memory of doctors Wilhelm Reich and Dinshah Darius,
among other victims of this witch hunt (as we honor the memories of those
earlier victims of witch hunts who were often Wise Women and Healers.).
In America, after decades of sporadic and arbitrary attacks on health food
stores, holistic doctors and alternative practitioners, a powerful groundswell
of public opinion surged in the early 1990s. People demonstrated at FDA
offices around the country, converged on Washington, flooded Congress with
letters and faxes. Those were heady days, when the political establishment
first took note of what has come to be called the Health Freedom Movement. The
result was congressional passage, without any negative votes, of the Dietary
Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). That law was supposed to
protect the right of nutrient purveyors to make truthful and not misleading
claims about the nutritional benefits of their products for the normal
structure and function of the body.
This did not, however, stop the attempts of cartel and its friends in power.
Numerous times since then efforts have been mounted in the media, through
cartel-financed schools and journals, and in the government, to discredit all
dietary supplements and all Complementary and Alternative Modalities (CAM).
The usual process includes fake science, smear and innuendo. In recent years,
add to that, very sophisticated attacks on web sites offering products or
information about nutrition and CAM.
The battle is being fought in each state, where now discredited
“quackbusters” attacked doctors wanting to practice advanced CAM
techniques; in the federal government where important therapies that can
benefit many people, such as the responsible use of silver in health 3, are
under attack; and on the international level where “harmonization” means
reducing our Freedom to some bland bureaucratic “minimum daily
requirement.” On the international level Codex Alimentarius, the World Food
Code, is the chief bureaucratic mechanism to undermine organic standards,
prevent people from knowing what foods are genetically modified – and which
are not – and otherwise make the Big Pharma Cartel agenda international
policy. Regional bureaucracies, such as the EU, NAFTA and the ominous North
American Union play an important role in imposing the harm of harmonization.
4
Recently, even the Journal of the AMA, JAMA, included a highly suspect
“meta-analysis” of carefully chosen “studies” to claim that taking
vitamins could be bad for your health! This article was strongly criticized
by Life Extension Foundation5 and others in the field, but the mass media
covered only the fake science, not the response. Literally tens of thousands
of good scientific studies prove the value of supplementation. It has been
suggested that those who trust the AMA and FDA should certainly not take any
vitamins, especially the mega doses many of us have used for decades. Then in
a few years, we’ll see who is still around to continue the argument!
Yes, at each turn, the attacks of the cartelists and bureaucrats have been met
with stiff public resistance. The attempt to water down organic standards gave
rise to a tidal wave of protest. The original FDA “structure and function”
regulation in 1999 was successfully opposed and the final rule was rather more
friendly to nutritional products. The public outcry in each of these cases was
similar to what is happening now with the FDA’s surreptitiously promulgated
CAM draft Guidance (“issued” on December 26th; no public notice until
February 26th; initially only a short comment period). The grassroots of the
Health Freedom Movement caught fire when the people learned that FDA’s
bureaucrats, under the guise of “just restating the law” were actually
setting the basis for handing over our supplements and alternatives to the Big
Pharma Cartel. 6
But the song continues, and big government representative Ted Kennedy, has
just introduced S-1082, a bill that may gut our Health Freedom. Curiously, we
had heard this bill was dead before submission and would not be submitted. As
soon as the current public outcry reached a very high level, along comes the
senator, with a bill intended to divert attention from the other
anti-supplement bills, Codex, the NAU and the anti-CAM guidance.
It is time to Kill the Kennedy Bill in Committee! While we won’t be diverted
from our vigilance of the FDA anti-CAM maneuver, it is important to react to
these other assaults on Health Freedom. We would like to see this bill killed
in committee. Better to knock it out in congressional committee than allow it
to waste our time. While comments directed at the FDA over its anti-CAM draft
guidance was the proper response, as required by the Federal Register notice,
this back-door effort by the senior senator from Massachusetts should be met
with a flood of messages to the chairman and the members of the oversight
committee that must approve the bill before it goes before the entire Senate.
That will be our strategy in the coming weeks. Of course, if we cannot stop it
in committee, it may be necessary to attempt constructive engagement with the
committee and senators, to amend the bill to protect supplements. Just this
step, according to postings on April 28th on the blog at Mercola.com, has been
suggested by leading nutrition attorney Jonathan Emord JD.
All of these multiple assaults are, of course, connected. They are connected
in philosophy, proponents and beneficiaries. Their proponents refuse to allow
us the freedom to make our own choices, deeming that their political power
gives them the authority to decide for us. We have had enough of such
deciders. They have given us a medical system that kills hundreds of
thousands each year. We reject the philosophy that “the leader is always
right;” that we should just shut up and take all the prescriptions Big
Pharma sells. We know that the cartel that benefits from all these rules and
regulations has plenty of money and jobs to bribe politicians and bureaucrats.
None of that matters when the people are alerted and vigilant! We assert our
“Right to heal and be healed.” 7 We will not be duped by false leaders,
naysayers and nitpickers. We are “mad as hell and won’t take it anymore!” The
time has come to assert thatfundamental right. We need, in both law and
fact, for this basic human right to be respected. We need an end to the power
of the cartel and its bureaucratic allies. And all this will come to pass
using the tools of modern communication, which will prove, I believe, in the
end, more powerful than cartels and politicians.
It does, however, depend on you. You need to support organizations like the
Natural Solutions Foundation, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, which shows continuing
leadership and, in fact, broke the FDA anti-CAM guidance story. Like everyone
else who unmasks the face of the Big Pharma Objective, they are currently
being smeared and defamed through disinformation and innuendo. Don’t be duped
by disinformation any more than you are by bad science. It’s up to you to see
through to the core of truth and to make your voice heard. It is time to
dream of a world where each person has the right to heal and be healed. That
is the dream we need to have, for our dream to come true.
Ralph Fucetola JD
www.vitaminlawyer.com
Notes
1. See the Charter at http://home.earthlink.net/~lifespirit23/herbcharter.htm
2. North Carolina’s Supreme Court in State v MacKnight, 42 S.E. 580, 1902 at p
582.
3. See: www.silverfacts.com
4. See Dr. Laibow’s Nutricide at www.globalhealthfreedom.org
5. See: http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/consumer_alert_020307.htm
6. See “Take Action” at www.healthfreedomusa.org
7. See: http://www.lifespirit.org/wiltondec.html
Could It Be That All The Problems Are Coincidence?
A couple of days ago The Natural Solutions Foundation sent out an Action Alert telling you that the FDA is at it again. Their “Proposed Guidance on CAM” will classify all natural therapies as “Medical Practices” so only licensed physicians will be able to practice them. Then the supplements and products used in those practices become “untested drugs” which are, in the US and elsewhere, illegal. Not only that, I can tell you as a physician that deviations from “practice guidelines” or “treatment algorithms” are increasingly cause for doctors to have their licenses pulled so few doctors will offer those modalities.
The Comments page , (http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185) I set up for you to use to send your comments electronically to the FDA during the public comment period (which ends on April 30) was working perfectly and, at last count, 11,030 people had sent comments to the FDA using that page.
And then the emails began coming in that said things like, “When I click the “submit” button, I get an ‘Error 404’ message.” and “When I clicked on the link in your email, I got a “Page no longer available” message and similar emails.
Connect the Dots!
Dot:
On March 14 of this year our site, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, was “locked” by our hosting company hours after we made it known that the huge number of drug-related deaths which are the leading cause of death in every developed country in the world fit in perfectly with the explicitly stated genocidal agenda of multinational and international organizations from the Council on Foreign Relations to the World Health Organization. We pointed out that this fits perfectly with the apparent underlying Codex agenda (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php/?p=322), coming as it does straight from Nazi Germany. (Check out the Nutricide Video on our home page, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org if you haven’t seen it! Email that link, too.)
Dot:
A temporary page telling people what happened after our site went down was mounted by our webmaster. Within hours his server and all of his sites were off the Internet because of a concerted, organized and illegal attack on our site and his hosting server. When he took our temporary site down, the attack ceased almost instantly and his sever and sites were back on line within minutes.
Dot:
Our Action Alert on the proposed New York legislation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php/?page_id=351) which will limit access to nutrients and supplements in that state was number 1 in Google’s ranking on the topic one day and suddenly disappeared from the Internet search engine altogether overnight!
Dot:
More than 11,000 people have responded to our urgent request that they file their objections to this latest FDA end run around DSHEA (the 1994 law which says that supplements and herbs are foods and, as such, are presumed to be safe). Our Action Alert emails on the topic have been widely circulated and people are using this opportunity to create another uproar like the one that prevented Congress from taking away our right to supplements in 1994 and brought us DSHEA!
Dot to Dot to Dot:
I Can See the Picture!
I think it is reasonable to conclude that our vigorous response and success is not particularly welcome to the FDA and their friends. And that means that we need to intensify our successful response right now! We only have until April 30, 2007 to let the FDA know that We, the People, want our health products, our health freedom and our self determination. The FDA also needs to know that we want Public Hearings on these issues and that we are willing to make our will loud and clear.
Here’s Your Part
You have been doing a great job of sending your comments to the FDA and circulating this information to your circle of influence. It may be hard to take in but if this “Guidance” goes through, there will be no more legal natural health and wellness modalities. There will be no more natural health and wellness products.
Our nutrients, if we are permitted any, will look very much like the low potency, no impact nutrients permitted in Europe under the Codex-Compliant European Food Supplements Directive (using any other nutrients in any other dosages is a crime). Our herbs, if we have any, will look very much like the very, very short list of herbs permitted ONLY FOR TRIVIAL COMPLAINTS in Europe under the European Medicinal Herbal Products Directive (using any other herbs for any other reasons is a crime). In other words, Big Pharma, like Big Brother at the end of George Orwell’s chillingly prophetic “1984” will have won.
We are That Close!
We are that close to loosing natural medicine. We are that close to loosing our health freedom.
It is imperative that you submit your comments to the FDA. If you value your health or your freedom (or both) you have only a narrow window of opportunity to raise your voice with all the other voices shouting for our right to make our own health decisions.
Use this link to access the page where you can submit your comments : http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185
If there is a problem wit the link, write to me with your information at dr.laibow@gmail.com and I will personally make sure that your comments are submitted to the FDA. Every one of them!
After you have submitted you comments, the next step is critical. Spend some time contacting all of the people in your circle of influence and, with a short note at the top of the email, explain how dangerous this threat is, how short the window of opportunity is and what the consequences will be if the FDA and Big Pharma succeed this time around. Please include the makers and sellers of your vitamins, minerals, etc. as well as the practitioners whom you know in your emails. Ask people, practitioners, health food stores, organizations and companies to alert their customers, patients, suppliers, friends, etc. We need millions of responses and we CAN get them if we all work together on this.
Oh, and please, don’t forget to write to me to let me know if you have any further problems with the links or the sites. We will fix them if you do.
Actually, I take heart from these attacks: if we were not effective, there would be no need for sabotage!
Remember, the FDA’s goal is simple: through a “Guidance” about the regulation of “CAM” (which they conveniently define as “Complementary and Alternative MEDICINE” instead of “Complementary and Alternative Modalities” the FDA hopes to serve the interests of Big Pharma by eliminating all CAM practices and products. ALL of them.
Criminalizing Natural Health
The FDA is using a legal ploy to make all natural health criminal in either one way or another. You can’t engage in it if you are not a physician and you cannot use the products even if you are. That’s very similar to the laws recently introduced in Australia (5 year prison sentence for using, providing to another person or teaching the use of nutrients) and India (illegal to practice or teach acupuncture, energy healing, sound therapy, etc., etc.). Neither law passed but they will be back in Parliament again. It’s the same process: marginalize, then criminalize all competition to the deadly, expensive and oh-so-useful drugs!
In your email to your circle of influence, please remember to Include a link to the Natural Solutions Foundation website (www.HealthFreedomUSA.org ). Tell them that we are protecting their health freedoms and ask them to lend their support to the health freedom battle which threatens to criminalize natural health! Let them know that when you click on this link, http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185, your comments will be automatically registered on the FDA site.
5,000,000
That’s our goal. Two weeks, five million comments to the FDA, all asserting our fundamental right to control our own health. Manufacturers, distributors, health food stores and natural practitioners pay close attention: the FDA is in the process of regulating your business out of existence. By April 30. If you value your work and your livelihood, ACT NOW!
Here’s that critically important link:
We are collectively doing a GREAT job. That’s the reason efforts to silence us crop up. We are not silent because we are right: our health and our freedom is worth speaking out for and we are doing it!
We ARE the Ones We Have Been Waiting For!
Oh, yes. One other thing: The lawyer who wrote this comments document did it for free. Our other legal consultants work for free. I work for free. General Stubblebine works for free. Our wonderful volunteers and Board Members accept no compensation. Everyone else who is providing services wants to be paid for the work they do for us. And rightly so, by the way. So don’t forget to feed the health freedom kitty by making a tax deductible donation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) or shopping at our all-organic store! Thanks for all your wonderful support.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth is trying to make your influence disappear. You see, Wyeth has a problem: 50, 000 irate consumers who have written comments to the FDA to make it clear what they think about Wyeth throwing its weight around and using the FDA to shore up their failing market in deadly synthetic hormones by making safe, natural bio-identical ones illegal. The response was so strong that they actually amended the original Citizens Petition to try to make it seem as if they were not doing exactly what they were doing: trying to kill a natural health option to protect their market share for a group of dangerous and ineffective drugs. And, as long as they were at it, they decided that they would kill the profession of compounding pharmacy. Those are the specially trained pharmacists who custom make personalized prescriptions for patients on the order of their doctors. Instead of counting out pills into bottles, they compound exactly what a particular patients needs.
Since compounding pharmacists can create what a patient needs, not what a big company decides to market, these advanced pharmacists are your doctor’s partners in bringing safe, natural and personalized formulations to patients. Millions of women depend on their skills to provide their individualized doses of the natural female hormones which they need. Many of them used to take synthetic hormones like Wyeth’s Prempro (C), imitation progesterone mixed with Wyeth’s horse urine (honest!) from pregnant mares, Premarin (C).
For many years, the dogma of conventional medicine was that menopausal women needed to take hormones and stay on them for the rest of their lives since doing so would prevent the heart disease which so often afflicts women after the end of their reproductive years. It was also supposed to protect them from senile dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, osteoporosis, wrinkles, dry mucosa (especially vaginal dryness) and on and on and on.
Remembering to forget that hormones are tiny molecules which act at ultra low concentrations on every single cell of the body and that they are highly structurally specific (so a single atom’s difference could mean the difference between safe and wildly dangerous), doctors pushed with all their might for women to take structurally altered synthetic hormones made by companies like Wyeth. The fashion — or perhaps the rage — as to get women on the synthetic versions and either dismiss or skip any mention of the natural alternatives which some doctors prescribed for women. These natural hormones were prescribed by a small number of doctors who understood the importance of using molecules which are identical to those that nature makes inside the body. Patients appear to experience fewer side effects from taking them and, critically important, fewer deadly problems like cancer.
But natural molecules cannot be patented so they are quite cheap. And natural molecules therefore do not generate the revenue to create fancy advertisements and expensive medical courses and glossy brochures, and expensive dinners for doctors and desk toys and calendars and pens and attractive drug reps and trips and…. and…. and …. In fact, even compounded for each patient, they are still considerably cheaper than synthetic hormones.
And then the 2002 shock that sent millions of reeling women looking for a doctor who knew how to prescribe natural hormones: a huge 15 year National Institute of Health study involving 168,000 + women called “The Women’s Health Initiative”, designed to establish the protective impact of Wyeth’s synthetic hormones Premarin (c) and Prempro (c) was shut down nearly 3 years early because these synthetic chemicals, either alone or together, increased women’s risks for heart attacks, breast and uterine cancers, senile dementia and other deadly diseases. Nearly as bad, the supposed protection against these and other catastrophic conditions was just not there.
Wyeth’s market share of the “Premarin Family” of drugs plummeted by more than 60%.
After letting the dust settle a bit, Wyeth decided to fight: On October 5, 2005 they entered a Citizens Petition to compel the FDA to put compounding pharmacists into the dust bin of history (despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that the FDA has no jurisdiction over this profession) AND ban the molecules that compete with their deadly drugs: estrogen and progesterone. The original 6 month comment period was set to expire on April 4, 2006. When health freedom activists asked people to register their opinion with the FDA, the outpouring was so great that the FDA server, we understand, was overwhelmed. For that reason or for some other reason, the comment period was extended by 30 days until May 4, 2005.
More than 50,000 comments have been registered with the FDA. If you have already written a comment in support of your right to make your own health decisions and do what you and your doctor believe is best for you, thank you.
If, on the other hand, you have not yet done so, now, now, NOW is the time. Simply click here (http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=3356) to let the FDA know that your health freedom is important to you!
Wyeth’s amended Citizens Petition attempts to put a very different spin on what it trying to do. But, regardless of the PR dance, killing the competition and calling it “consumer protection” strikes me as corrupt as disease mongering by making up diseases and selling dangerous compounds that consume precious resources and expose people to iatrogenic (doctor caused) side effects up to and including preventable death.
Here is what Andy Komuves, R.Ph.of the International Association of Compounding Pharmacists has to say about Wyeth’s Citizens Petition and amendment:
Wyeth Backtracks; But Second Verse Same as the First
On Tuesday, Wyeth issued a press release announcing that it recently filed supplemental comments on its petition. The new Wyeth comments attempt to reframe the BHRT issue and to create the impression that those opposing the petition are merely confused about Wyeth’s intentions.Wyeth is feeling the heat. We’ll stop nothing short of complete victory, but we’re encouraged today that we’ve got Wyeth’s PR team on its heels. They’re trying to revise history and say that their petition isn’t what we say it is: an attempt to rob women of access to bioidentical hormones.
According to news service Reuters, Wyeth filed supplemental comments with FDA this month and issued a press release to respond to some of the “misunderstandings,” as Wyeth calls them, about its citizen petition. You can read the Reuters article here.
Six months after it filed its initial comments, Wyeth finds itself up against about 50,000 people mostly patients and physicians who are upset with what the company is doing. So it’s no surprise that Wyeth feels compelled to re-frame its position.
They’ve just put lipstick on a pig. It’s a kindler, gentler attack on pharmacy compounding. Wyeth’s PR team drafted some platitudes about the value of compounding to adorn its supplemental filing, but the underlying legal theory is no less restrictive and harmful to patients than the original petition.
And its motives definitely haven’t changed. Wyeth is still seeking a political solution to a business problem to remove from the market an alternative to its flagging products.
If you haven’t written to FDA to oppose Wyeth’s comments or if your patients or their physicians haven’t either it’s not too late. Make sure there’s no misunderstanding at FDA: Wyeth’s petition will harm patients and must be rejected. … Tell the FDA to protect patient health, not Wyeth’s wealth.
Health freedom is not good for big pharma but it is good for you. Please send this blog to everyone you know and urge them to send a comment to the FDA urging them to protect their right to make natural health choices for themselves.
Thanks for your activism,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Recently the Wall Street Journal published the most outrageous print attack yet on your health and mine. This ordinarily respected newspaper chose to tout highly questionable science to tell us that vitamins pose dangers to our health and chances of survival. BALDERDASH
I hope that the article that follows will spur you to take vitamins and minerals to protect your health and well being. Please be aware that the level of under nutrition which follows from bad science like this and treating vitamins and minerals as dangers the way the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline does, is the best way I know of to insure that you will develop otherwise preventable serious diseases, get sick and stay that way. The propaganda machine is working hard to convince you that nutrients are somehow bad for you. This is part of the effort to soften you up to accept a “harmonized” approach to Codex. That way, when you can’t get effective nutrients you won’t miss them because the big lie (“Nutrients are dangerous since they cause changes in the human body”) has become the way most people have been trained to view things. Those who lament their loss will be marginalized by mass media propaganda pieces like the one in the Wall Street Journal. Never mind that they are based on bad (or no) science. They are part of a magnificently orchestrated campaign to make optimal nutrition (which I believe requires nutrient supplementation in a toxic world) a non-option for you and your family.
Just as I was sitting down to write a response to this poppycock, I received an email which contained an excellent summary of why this is bad science and very, very poor public policy. This article was written by Jean Carper and forwarded to me by Elwood Richard, a long time supporter of health and health freedom.
I include the complete article here: it is well worth reading and sharing with your friends and those in your circle of influence.
Special Report : The media strikes again
A report in the Wall Street Journal unfairly attacks vitamins as doing more harm than good, adding more fuel to the vitamin wars and getting many facts wrong. Here’s the real truth.
http://www.stopagingnow.com/pages/specialreport/wsj
The WSJ’s Fictitious “Case Against Vitamins”
By Jean Carper
Vitamin opponents’ efforts to steer you away from supplements have taken a frightening new direction. Attacks on vitamins are escalating from allegations of merely “useless” to “extremely dangerous.” This alarming message is central to “The Case Against Vitamins,” in the Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2006. The subhead sets the tone: “Recent studies show that many vitamins not only don’t help. They may actually cause harm.”
Should you throw away your vitamins? No. In assembling its “case,” to scare people away from vitamins, the WSJ said much that is not scientifically accepted and left much unsaid. It cites carefully selected and sometimes outdated studies without proper perspective; misses or omits studies that contradict the premise, and fails to give a fair analysis by respected vitamin experts, choosing instead, sources of lesser expertise, credibility and credentials. Whether the bias is careless or reflects a mindset friendly to extensive pharmaceutical advertising, is impossible to tell.
Here’s how the Wall Street Journal got it completely wrong about vitamins E, A and C, on which they based the major part of their “case.”
Vitamin E in Wonderland
You might suspect the fix is in when the first person quoted by the WSJ is cardiologist Edgar R. Miller, author of one of the most criticized and denounced studies ever done on vitamin E. Eminent vitamin E researchers called his analysis, claiming common doses of vitamin E boosted death rates 4% to 6%, a case study in the misuse of statistics with laughable conclusions. If it were true, this absurd conclusion means taking vitamin E is more deadly than smoking, points out Jeffrey Blumberg, chief of antioxidant research at Tufts University. Dr. Blumberg and other vitamin E luminaries were so appalled, they signed a full page ad that ran in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, denouncing Miller’s assertions that vitamin E was unsafe.
Dr. Blumberg also teamed up with 12 other international authorities to refute that vitamin E is unsafe at doses under 1600 IU a day, in the April, 2005 issue of the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Among those condeming Miller’s conclusions are world-renowned antioxidant and vitamin E researchers, Lester Packer PhD, University of Southern California, and Maret Traber, PhD, Oregon State University and authority on vitamin E toxicity for the National Academy of Sciences. NIH’s head of alternative and complementary medicine also told me he didn’t believe the study.
Miller’s study, in fact, was exposed as bogus soon after it came out, its credibility destroyed by a major NIH study that found NO serious adverse effects, let alone death, in 40,000 women who took 600 IU of vitamin E every other day for ten years! If vitamin E was harmful or deadly, it surely would have shown up in this largest, longest vitamin E test ever done. Such a massive clinical trial overwhelmingly trumps previous studies like Miller’s, and is irrefutable testimony to the utter safety of vitamin E at common doses, says Dr. Traber.
More remarkable, contrary to Miller’s false predictions of death from vitamin E, the NIH study revealed it as an astonishing lifesaver. “It’s the most exciting findings about vitamin E in 10 years!” said Dr. Traber.
The truth is heart deaths dropped 24% in women who took vitamin E. And it gets better. In women 65 and over, prime targets of heart attacks, vitamin E slashed death rates an incredible 49%–nearly in half!, the NIH study showed. This means taking vitamin E might save over 200,000 women a year from heart disease deaths, figures Dr. Traber.
Imagine. If a drug did that, it would be heralded as a miracle cure; doctors would wildly prescribe it, and its stock would soar, says Traber. But without huge drug money behind it, vitamin E is unfairly trashed as dangerous by the press and blacklisted by doctors, all to the detriment of people who could benefit greatly from it.
The Vitamin A Tales:
After repeating the widely-published hazards of high doses of beta carotene for current smokers, the WSJ “Case Against Vitamins,” takes on vitamin A as cause of hip fractures, citing a 2002 Harvard nurses’ study, that “associated” high vitamin A from foods, multivitamins and supplements, with a 48% higher risk for hip fractures. It is naive to use this study to slam supplements, since the greatest vitamin A threat came from consuming too much liver, not supplements. Nor was vitamin A a fracture hazard to women on estrogen, suggesting more complex factors than vitamin A.
Nor is the Harvard indictment of vitamin A the last word on the issue. Much research contradicts it. A 2004 large-scale, 9.5-year study of 34,703 postmenopausal women by the University of Minnesota, cleared vitamin A, in both supplements and food, of promoting fractures. Specifically researchers made clear there was “no evidence” that women who took the highest doses of vitamin A supplements were most apt to break a hip. (Lim LS, Osteoporos Int, 2004 Jul;15(7):552-9)
Most important, better-designed studies overshadow and refute the 4-year-old Harvard study that the WSJ relied on to build its anti-vitamin A case, and even suggest the opposite: that higher vitamin A, surprisingly, may also be tied to fewer fractures.
The difference comes from the way the study is designed. More current sophisticated research compares an individual’s actual blood level of vitamin A with his or her bone density and fracture history. The Harvard study simply asked women what foods they ate, then estimated their vitamin A intake based on food-nutrient tables, and compared this with the number of fractures in the women. Obviously, this is a crude and unreliable measure of vitamin A status, compared with actual blood tests.
In several studies using blood tests, the vitamin A threat disappears or is turned upside down. At least, three recent studies that sampled blood for vitamin A content, either find no bone-hazard from vitamin A–or a LOWER risk of fractures.
British researchers at the University of Sheffield, scrutinized the blood of some 1200 women over age 75, searching for evidence that vitamin A induced fractures. No such thing. Women with the highest blood levels of vitamin A were 15% LESS apt to suffer a fracture of any bone, including the hip, than those with the lowest blood vitamin A. Women taking multivitamins (including vitamin A) or vitamin-A-dense cod liver oil were even better off–24% less apt to break a bone. (Barker ME, J Bone Miner Res.2005 Jun;20 (6):913-20.
At New York’s Columbia University, a similar 22-year long study of 2799 American women ages 50 to 74, found that fracture risk nearly doubled in women with both the lowest and highest blood concentrations of vitamin A, adding more confusion and controversy to the debate. (Opotowsky AR, Am J Med 2004 Aug 1;117(3): 169-74)
In a side note, a recent Italian study showed that women with osteoporosis had lower blood levels of vitamin A, as well as vitamin C and E, suggesting lower antioxidant defenses against free radical damage may be involved in bone destruction and accelerated aging. (Maggio D.,J clin Endocrinol Metab 2003 Apr;88(4):1523-7).
Bottom Line: The issue of vitamin A and bones is unsettled and highly debatable. The evidence is conflicting and confusing. The WSJ’s black and white “Case Against Vitamins,” gave no indication of this. It presented vitamin A as a bone-hazard, case closed, hyping a fear of vitamin A among readers, when that is not an accepted scientific finding by any stretch. The jury is still out, and it could go several ways.
Vitamin C as Villain? Amazing
“Like other vitamin studies, research into vitamin C has been disappointing,” recites the WSJ’s Case Against Vitamins” saying it might not prevent colds or fight cancer, as Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling promised it would 30 years ago. To press the point further, the WSJ article resurrects studies, asserting vitamin C can promote cancer and even death.
On the contrary, a new Japanese study says taking 500 mg of vitamin C daily cut odds of getting three or more colds over 5 years by 66%.
But that’s of small consequence compared with dazzling new research identifying vitamin C as a promising new cancer drug. Excitement over the anticancer properties of vitamin C is dramatically escalating, rather than diminishing, among top-drawer scientists. It’s hard to fathom how the Wall Street Journal missed this fact, since a quick search turns up dozens of studies of vitamin C’s remarkable abilities to stop cancer.
Far from encouraging cancer growth, as the Wall Street Journal’s outdated information asserted, vitamin C selectively targets and kills cancer cells, leaving normal cells unharmed, says groundbreaking research by Mark Levine, MD at the National Institutes of Health. High doses of vitamin C rapidly killed 100% of human lymphoma cells, reports Levine, as well as 9 other cancer cells, including breast, ovarian, lung, kidney and colon.
Moreover, Levine notes that some doctors already give high- dose intravenous vitamin C to help stop cancer. The evidence for increased survival and safety is so impressive, even in advanced late-stage cancer, that Levine has called for a “re-evaluation of vitamin C as cancer therapy.”
Levine explains that for years researchers missed Pauling’s point and failed to understand precisely how vitamin C destroys cancer cells and why very high doses are needed. In original studies, Pauling administered 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day intravenously to terminal cancer patients for about 10 days, and then high oral doses of C afterward. Those on vitamin C improved and survived longer. When Mayo Clinic researchers set out to verify Pauling’s findings, they gave high oral doses, not intravenous doses, and concluded it didn’t work. However, it is impossible, Levine notes, to raise vitamin C blood levels to cancer-lethal doses orally. The vitamin C vanishes too quickly. Doses deadly to cancer cells can be achieved only intravenously by jacking up blood levels of vitamin C 25 times higher than oral doses do.
For example, doctors at the University of Kansas gave two women with stage 3 ovarian carcinoma 60,000 mg of vitamin C intravenously twice a week, as well as conventional chemotherapy. Their tumors vanished and they showed no signs of cancer 3 1/2 years later. The doctors are now conducting a randomized test of high vitamin C (and other antioxidants) along with chemotherapy in women newly diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
More amazing: Dr. Levine and NIH colleagues personally documented three cases of advanced cancer in which vitamin C shrank tumors, dramatically increasing survival.
• A 49-year-old man diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer in 1996 declined chemotherapy in favor of high-dose vitamin C infusions. Nine years later he is alive and cancer-free.
• A 66-year-old woman with an aggressive lymphoma and a “dismal prognosis” in 1995, also rejected chemotherapy, but had radiation, and intravenous high-dose vitamin C. She, too is alive 10 years later.
• A 51-year-old woman with kidney cancer that had spread to her lungs, opted for alternative therapy, including high-dose intravenous vitamin C given twice weekly for 10 months. Two months later, scans showed the tumors were gone. Her cancer remained in remission for four years. A smoker, she died of lung cancer that did not respond to the same therapy.
The Wall Street Journal is correct in saying that many doctors oppose use of antioxidants, including vitamin C, during chemotherapy, fearing interference with treatment. But experts point out the idea is only “theoretical,” and has no evidence to justify it. The WSJ assertion that antioxidants may “promote some cancer and interfere with treatments,” is without scientific merit. The one study that tested the theory found no difference in outcome–and certainly no worsening from antioxidants.
The latest evidence from the top experts at the National Institutes of Health not only rebuts the fictitious danger of vitamins to cancer patients, but shows that antioxidants, notably vitamin C, have the power to shrink cancer, produce remissions and dramatically extend life of even advanced cancer patients. Although it is still unclear how effective lower doses of vitamin C may be in preventing or fighting cancer, it is implausible that they could be harmful, considering that massive doses are not and, in fact, are so beneficial.
Should we hold our collective breath for the WSJ to do a major story on the ascent of vitamin C as a potentially powerful, inexpensive and incredibly safe cancer “drug?” Imagine the impact of that on pharmaceutical profits.
< < END
In the US we have a precious (and much attacked) law called DSHEA (the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act passed in 1994) which holds that nutrients are foods and, as such, can have no upper limits set upon them. Codex holds the opposit: the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline says that nutrients should have upper limits assessed by Risk Assessment, a technique designed to determine just how high a toxic dose can be before it produces changes in your body and then set limits 100 lower than that.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently produced a Workshop document to help [sic] Codex with the application of Risk Assessment to nutrients. This document defines an
as ANY change in ANYTHING that can be measured in a human (a biomarker). So any change, whether positive or negative, which is brought about by a nutrient is an adverse event under Codex!
What to do? Several things.
First, inform yourself. Make sure you watch “Nutricide: the DVD” and tell your friends about it or arrange a public showing in your church, club or school. Download a copy of the highly informative Codex e-Book which was presented to decision makers in Africa last month. It contains a wealth of information on the solution to the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and an in-depth essay on nutritional medicine you need.
Second, take action. Sign the Citizens Petition and join the thousands of others who are challenging the US Government’s Codex policy. Then “Ride the Freedom Mouse” to let Congress know that your health and health freedom is really important to you.
Oh, yes, one more action step: send a letter to the FDA and one to Congress to prevent Wyeth from smashing the competition that natural molecules offer to toxic synthetic hormones. You see, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (which makes Premarin and Prempro) is attempting to pressure the FDA to ban its competitors, Bio-Identical Hormones. Premarin (synthetic estrogen made from pregnant mares urine) and Prempro (the synthetic estrogen plus synthetic progesterone called “progestin”) are so toxic that a National Institutes of Health drug trial using these two hormones which involved 168,000 menopausal women was halted early (2002) to protect women from the increased risks of heart disease, breast cancer, blood clots, blindness and strokes which they carry with them although they have no clinical benefit whatsoever.
Millions of women got the message and switched to safe, natural hormones which do protect them but don’t carry the risks of the synthetic hormones. Now, four years later, Wyeth has hijacked the Citizens Petition process to work its corporate magic: wave a wand and take away safe, inexpensive options leaving only dangerous, expensive drugs.
Hmmm. Sounds a lot like Codex to me.
Not happy with this turn of events? Support the Natural Solutions Foundation with your contribution or monthly pledge (donate $50 or more and we will send you a letter for your tax records stating the contribution is tax deductible).
Thanks. Your activism is essential to our success.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Laibow
PS: More on Africa to follow. I’ve been really, really swamped!
If anyone had a shred of doubt that Codex is creeping toward us on all of its loathsome legs as quickly as possible, rather like a venomous centipede, that doubt should vanish by the time you finish this blog. Each of the segments of the Codex creature may appear to be unaware of what the others are doing, but the net result is forward movement coordinated by some ganglion of control somewhere. Where? I don’t know, but I do know that the effect is one I don’t like one bit.
This week and next, the Joint House/Senate Appropriations Committee will be finalizing the 2007 Agriculture Spending Bill. Using the thinly veiled excuse of meeting the requirements of a Federal Judge who ruled in favor of an Organic Blueberry farmer in Maine in Harvey v. Veneman that the USDA organic standards violated the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act and that synthetic materials could not be added to food, the USDA is once again trying to destroy organic food purity by submitting a Draft Amendment to the Joint Committee which would BRING US ORGANIC FARMING STANDARDS INTO COMPLIANCE WITH CODEX ONES despite the fact that these standards are highly damaging to the American Organic standards. They will allow the following without labeling or identification:
– Pesticides to be used in the growing of organic food
– Synthetic materials to be included in organic foods
– Cattle can be treated with antibiotics and then administratively converted back to “organic
– Large percentage of non-organic feed for supposedly organic animals
This is the same imitative that the same USDA and the same industries attempted to bring us in 1997-78 when they wanted to use toxic sludge containing cadmium and other heavy metals as “fertilizer” for organics along with the ever-popular pesticides, herbicides (many of which contain mercury, by the way) and veterinary drugs for animals.
This is the same initiative that is leading to the attempt to undermine, gut or overturn DSHEA (by the way, if you haven’t sent your letters to Congress to protect DSHEA, please do so now). The target here, however, is yet another set of protective regulations embodied in the Organic Foods Production Act which give us the option of purchasing a reliably healthy, non-polluted, non-GMO, non-toxic food supply.
If you value your right to make meaningful choices about your health AND if you value your health AND if you see the relationship between your food and your health, NOW IS THE HOUR! Write to Congress now to impress upon them how important retaining meaningful organic food standards are to you!
You know, if I were reading this and other blogs and emails the Natural Solutions Foundation sends out I might get weary: there are so many issues, so many times I get asked to write to Congress, so many different problems. And that is exactly the point. If the issues can be fragmented and we can be driven into apathy, Codex and its organizational brethren, global control and loss of personal freedoms, win. The Bigs, who have enough lawyers and publicists and campaign managers, win. Big Pharma, Big Agribiz, Big Biotechna, Big Chema and Big Medica get to set the rules, set the standards and reap the benefits. Your illness and needless suffering and mine are not even collateral damage because they profit two Bigs on that list: Big Pharma and Big Medica.
So yes, there are a lot of letters to write and there will be more. And yes, there will be a lot of issues coming at you. And yes, this war is being fought on many fronts. Remember Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. Which side would each and every one of the Founding Fathers and Mothers (yes, there were women partitions, too) have been on? Corporate greed and the apathy that allows it to flourish or the battle for our bodies and our rights under our own control?
So please contact Congress NOW! We have about 1 week on this one, perhaps less. “Urgent” does not even begin to describe this one!
Oh, two more things: don’t forget about starting a Health Freedom Meetup (go to http:.//healthfreedom.meetup.com to get started). You pick the time, date and location. Let people in your area know about it by email, word of mouth and some posters in health food stores, etc. Schedule it with me and I will do a phone visit via speaker phone and provide materials to make organizing easier. Grass roots give us the strength we need. Spreading the word is absolutely crucial. It’s a numbers game: the number of their dollars versus the numbers of our voices! If we have enough numbers, we win. If not, we loose. It’s that simple.
The other item is donation to our $10,000 fund. We are less than $800 away from our fund raising goal. If you have not yet done so, please donate generously. Think about what having dedicated health freedom warriors on your side is worth to you and share that amount with us. Consider making a monthly pledge so that we can spend our time on the battle, not on finding the resources to stay in the battle.
Thanks for you continuing active involvement. Your emails and calls are inspiring and heart warming. I learn from them every day and I appreciate the new ways of fighting this war coming from you.
Yours in health and organic freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director