Millions of people around the world today help safeguard their own health with a wide choice of natural remedies and supplements, many of them containing vitamins, minerals and herbs. For the past 30 years, it is a fact that a significant proportion of the population in the western industrialised nations has cease to rely completely on conventional medicine in favour of more natural approaches to the prevention and treatment of disease using sensible nutrition and other modalities. They have done this for one simple and straight-forward reason. They don't see the orthodox medical approach working in most areas of disease.
This mass-migration of income from the medicine and pharmaceutical industries into the huge diversity of companies comprising what is known as the "alternative health industry" has not gone unnoticed by the powers-that-be. Today, British and Continental citizens are finding that new legislation from Brussels is seeking either to ban or strictly limit the availability of a wide range of traditional remedies and supplements that have been used by the public for decades, and in some cases centuries, for their well-being. Something sinister called Codex Alimentarius is casting its Big Brother shadow across the Eurozone. Americans and other world populations are looking on with apprehension as they know they are next.
On 12th March 2002, the European Parliament voted and passed regulations which limit the public availability and upper intakes of hundreds of nutrients to ridiculously low levels - in certain cases, 1/50th or even less of what many nutritional doctors recommend as therapeutic doses.
Like Germany and France, many are now facing the prospect of not just severe censure in the amounts of these nutrients they can take, but what they can buy at all. For, hidden within the Trojan Horse "harmonisation" proposals used to justify entering the launch codes against the alternative health industry, the realisation is dawning that anything not on the EU positive list of "accepted" supplements is now in for an outright ban. Manufacturers who wished to field anything "new" will be required to spend millions proving benefit through exhaustive "drug testing" - a state of affairs guaranteed to bankrupt even the most stalwart of the green corporations. (68)
They have set up a system where it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to
develop a new drug in America. They have established a similar system with supplements
in Europe. Well, right there you know you are dealing with a monopoly situation.
("Cancer-Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth", 52)
In spite of some 400 million pieces of mail, e-mails, faxes and skywritings
thrown at Brussels vociferously protesting this attack on human rights, along
the predictable media black-out, the legislation was approved with no House
debate at the usual tornado velocity, with 383 MEPs in favour and 139 against.
Considerable resources had been expended by the pharmaceutical industry to lobby
members for their vote. The public's outrage was ignored. (69)
Brussels doesn't recognise that you even have a right to complain about what
it does. Get used to it. This is the Roman/Napoleonic system operating in Europe,
as well as increasingly now in Britain. There is nothing you can do about any
of this through what you perceive as "traditional parliamentary channels".
There aren't any. (189)
This is part of an ongoing global effort to corporatise the alternative health industry. From the EU perspective, these vitamin and herbal directives are simply another example of Brussels doing what Brussels does best, and that is, writing legislation that minutely directs what people can and can't do inside the Eurozone. This is the traditional Continental way of doing things. The moves currently afoot to take away people's right to choose nutritional supplements they have traditionally used has been a rude awakening for many in Britain and elsewhere, but the EU actually means no harm or offence in this. This is just business in Brussels as usual. (188)
The European Union is proposing to:
> Ban over 300 natural ingredients from free sale;
> Restrict the dosage level of "approved" nutrients to levels that
will render them ineffective;
> Ban herbal remedies for no other reason than that they don't have a 30-year
history of use;
> Ban any statements about the effectiveness of nutrients in dealing with
disease;
> Give governments the right to re-classify safe and effective natural remedies
as medicines - at will. (163)