things to worry about
I'm a nerd. I have the whole 'believe no one, and trust nothing' do-your-own-research complex. The result is that when someone sent me an email about Codex Alimentarius threatening our access to vitamins, minerals, and supplements with links to this one site that kept linking to itself instead of anybody else, it made me kind of nervous, but it sounded decently researched, and I wanted to understand why people were upset. I looked into it and wrote down what I learned. Then I put my rough draft aside until after lunch.
This afternoon, my bullshit detector went off when I re-read the draft of my post. My own post. So I went to Snopes, where I found that people have been freaking out about this Codex Alimentarius group for a while, with varying amounts of reason.
Here's what I have so far:
Codex Alimentarius is a UN commission trying to put together guidelines for food and dietary supplements. They want to classify supplements as drugs and would love to be able to force their rules on all UN member nations, but here are the teeth: if a supplement manufacturer from non-compliant country has a problem selling to a compliant country, the compliant people win. Inside the US it would have no effect unless we wanted it to, and geez, people, this is the US, and how often do we let the UN tell us what to do?
According to this undated but post July 12, 2005 editorial from Metagenics, a well-known supplement company, we should be more worried about the "EU [Food Supplements] Directive that has placed extreme limitations on the types and quantities of vitamins and minerals that can be sold in EU countries." However, I haven't found any confirmation of that, so I'll send you to this nice pdf from the American Herbal Products Association, which sounds downright mellow compared to everybody else.
The upshot here is that we just have to keep an eye on our Congresspeople, who are rightly concerned about supplements like ephedra and penis enlargement pills, and make sure they don't do anything stupid, but you have to watch them anyway, so that's not new, is it?
This afternoon, my bullshit detector went off when I re-read the draft of my post. My own post. So I went to Snopes, where I found that people have been freaking out about this Codex Alimentarius group for a while, with varying amounts of reason.
Here's what I have so far:
Codex Alimentarius is a UN commission trying to put together guidelines for food and dietary supplements. They want to classify supplements as drugs and would love to be able to force their rules on all UN member nations, but here are the teeth: if a supplement manufacturer from non-compliant country has a problem selling to a compliant country, the compliant people win. Inside the US it would have no effect unless we wanted it to, and geez, people, this is the US, and how often do we let the UN tell us what to do?
According to this undated but post July 12, 2005 editorial from Metagenics, a well-known supplement company, we should be more worried about the "EU [Food Supplements] Directive that has placed extreme limitations on the types and quantities of vitamins and minerals that can be sold in EU countries." However, I haven't found any confirmation of that, so I'll send you to this nice pdf from the American Herbal Products Association, which sounds downright mellow compared to everybody else.
The upshot here is that we just have to keep an eye on our Congresspeople, who are rightly concerned about supplements like ephedra and penis enlargement pills, and make sure they don't do anything stupid, but you have to watch them anyway, so that's not new, is it?
posted by missmolly at 4:28 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home