Health Supreme Update: Foods Are Medicines: The Elusive Borderline

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23 Mar 2005 18:35:59 -0000

 

Health Supreme Update: Foods Are Medicines: The Elusive

Borderline

sepp

 

 

 

 

(( Health Supreme Update: Foods Are Medicines: The Elusive Borderline

))

 

March 23, 2005

 

 

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" Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food. "

Hippocrates (460-377 BC) We might say that the debate of what

is food and what is medicine goes back more than two thousand

years, to Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is also known as

the father of modern scientific medicine. In the early 1960s,

pharmaceutical medicines were in the headlines with a tragic

development. Mothers who had taken thalidomide during pregnancy

gave birth to children with severe deformities, while

contraceptive pills were being sold without any controls. New

pharmaceutical legislation was introduced in Europe in 1965 to

prevent such disasters in the future. The European directive

regulating...

 

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http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/09/28/foods_are_medicines_the_elusive_\

borderline.htm

 

 

 

In the case described in this article, Advocate General Geelhoed of the

European Court of Justice has recently filed his opinion, or concluding

remarks on the case in what is the last formal step before the court's

decision.

 

The German court of appeals asked the EU court for its view on several

questions. The original problem that led to the cases and their

referral to the EU court was the classification by German health

authorities, upheld by a previous court decision, of several products

as medicines, effectively banning them from being imported into

Germany:

 

- a lactobacillus product composed of six forms of friendly bacteria

- a vitamin C product of 1000 mg

- OPC 85, oligomeric procyanidins, a bioflavanol extract

- Acid free C - 1000 mg of vitamin C buffered by 110 mg of calcium

- E 400, capsules with 268 mg of vitamin E

 

The opinion goes into the legal question of how to separate food

products from medicines and shows clearly the great difficulty that an

extremely wide and ambiguous EU medicine definition brings in

determining coherently what is a food and what instead should be

registered as a medicine.

 

You can find the salient points of the Advocate General's opinion in a

comment, scrolling down to the very end of the page...

 

Kind regards

Sepp

 

 

 

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