EUROPE ENTERS A NUTRITION SCIENCE DARK AGE

[Guest guest]

EUROPE ENTERS A NUTRITION SCIENCE DARK AGE

 

 

 

By Attorney Jonathan Emord

December 14, 2009

NewsWithViews.com

 

As the clock strikes 12:01AM on January 1, 2010, Europe will enter a nutrition

science Dark Age. The stultifying effects of that backward movement will hit

food and dietary supplement companies hard all around the world. The movement

toward replacing private choice with government fiat proceeds apace

internationally. Europe's condemnation of food supplements and claims about them

is among the latest examples of that movement.

 

The nations of Europe gave up considerable national sovereignty to the European

Union a number of years ago. The members states have repeatedly reaped the

bitter fruit of that decision. One of those bitter fruits is about to fall from

the EU tree. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), established to preside

over food supplements and claims for food supplements by the European

Commission, has determined that only a small percentage of food supplements is

sufficiently safe and bioavailable to remain on the European market. Under

European Commission regulations no food supplement may be lawfully sold anywhere

in Europe unless EFSA scientists opine that the food supplement is both safe and

bioavailable as " substantiated by generally accepted scientific evidence. " EFSA

makes that determination in response to dossiers submitted from the regulated

companies. If no dossier is submitted for a nutrient either because the science

required cannot be obtained affordably or because no one has the resources to

pursue the claim, EFSA condemns the nutrient, deeming it inappropriate for

market.

 

Thus far out of over 40,000 dossiers submitted, EFSA has limited its

authorizations to certain vitamins and minerals and has rejected wholesale all

other vitamins, minerals, herbs and botanicals of various kinds. Moreover, it

has refused to allow claims of health benefit for a whole host of products.

These are the very same products that have been legally sold in Europe for

decades without any significant injury to the population. In short, EFSA is

achieving a massive constriction in the product and information offerings in the

European marketplace to the great detriment of European consumers. Fully

informed consumer choice is being wiped out. EFSA is dumbing down the European

marketplace, ridding it of substances that have improved the lives of Europeans

and of emerging science necessary to comprehend the potential health benefits of

food supplements.

 

This draconian system of prior restraint over products and scientific speech

deprives European consumers of the right to determine for themselves what food

elements to ingest and what credence to give emerging science concerning food

supplements. Those decisions are now being made by EFSA bureaucrats intolerant

of dissent from their new state orthodoxy on nutrition science.

 

EFSA is the nanny state writ large. Its scientists presume to know better than

all private scientists, all food supplement manufacturers, and all consumers

what is in the best interests of those consumers. In the real world of nutrition

science, virtually nothing can be said to have been proven to a conclusive

degree. Science, including nutrition science, is evolutionary and open to

debate. Scientists rarely agree on the extent to which a proposition backed by

studies is proven. Consequently, almost all of the emerging science on which

consumers depend to exercise informed choice is based on credible, but

inconclusive evidence. That should not surprise us because almost all medical

science upon which physicians make life and death decisions every day is

likewise in a realm of relative scientific uncertainty (lacking conclusive proof

to establish its efficacy). In steps, EFSA with its own brand of state certainty

substitutes its condemnatory judgment for free market exchanges, ridding the

market of nutrients and censoring from the market information indispensable to

the exercise of informed consumer choice.

 

 

Advertisement

 

The environment is one not of enlightenment or respect for individual rights. It

is not far from the mind set that preceded the Renaissance, a time when

Copernicus waxed bold by declaring that he thought the earth orbited the sun,

not the other way around. The church of old, like EFSA, views such claims of

emerging science with considerable skepticism and so censors them, depriving

citizens of a chance to judge for themselves the credibility of the claims.

 

When EFSA's opinions become law through adoption by the European Commission,

European consumers are locked out of nutrition science debate. They are deprived

of emerging science and the right to exercise their own judgment as to the

relative worth of nutrition science speech offerings. Instead, state censors

keep the vast majority of science out of the market and permit here and there

dribs and drabs to enter, skewing the information marketplace in ways they

favor. Thus, an elitist guard possesses a monopoly on information access and

deigns paternalistically to provide the public a small sampling it thinks " safe "

for European consumption. This gross example of censorship offends the very

notion of individual liberty. Europeans are thus enslaved anew by an

anti-Enlightenment philosophy that regards government as the end all be all in

the universe of food and nutrition science.

 

Depriving European consumers of emerging science leads to decisions in the

market that either presume health benefits to be greater than they likely are or

conversely to be non-existent. When science is kept from the point of sale,

consumers tend to base decisions on non-scientific factors, such as taste or

superstition. If I am ignorant of the health benefits of carotenoids and fiber

in a carrot, why would I choose a carrot over a twinkie? The twinkie tastes so

much better. Enlightened minds can make that election, choosing either to favor

taste over science or science over taste. Not so if information that leads to

enlightenment is illegal to obtain at the point of sale.

 

We should not think this matter limited to Europe. Not only do we depend

mightily on access to European markets for our food stuffs but we also depend on

European food stuffs here that may disappear as a result of EFSA's new draconian

limitations.

 

At a time of recession when we can scarce afford new significant limits to

markets, Europe is eliminating a significant sector of its food supplement

marketplace. American dietary supplements will be blocked from import and

enjoined from selling dietary supplements all across Europe. There will be

resultant lost profits here and unemployment. Likewise, import markets in the

United States dependent on European food supplements are going to be awakened

rudely to the fact that products legally sold before New Year's are no longer

lawfully saleable.

 

Certain ranking members of Congress and leading political managers at the Food

and Drug Administration are infatuated with the European example. They would

like nothing better than to replicate it here through harmonization of American

laws with those of the European Union.

 

The world of food regulation, like so much of the world, is now marching

steadily in the direction of state control and away from individual liberty.

Access to products with health enhancing features will be far more difficult in

Europe and in the United States in the months and years to come. Nutrition

science will remain locked out of the marketplace to the grave detriment of

consumers, causing only an information elite to benefit from knowledge of how

certain nutrients can extend longevity and reduce the incidence of disease.

 

This process of bureaucratic expansion and assumption of jurisdictional control

over matters previously governed by individual private decision making is an

insidious encroachment that replaces freedom with servility. If we can neither

be allowed to choose for consumption foods and food elements freely nor be

allowed access at the point of sale to information concerning the potential of

those substances to extend longevity and reduce disease risk, we can hardly call

ourselves free. Does anyone seriously doubt that the decision of what to eat and

the right of access to basic information on the health effects of what we eat

are fundamental to human liberty?

 

Europe's move back into a Dark Age in the field of nutrition science should

alarm us. Although we cannot but feel the adverse impact of the European

restrictions, we can only hope that the full brunt of the new Dark Age

enveloping Europe is confined to that continent, not welcomed here courtesy of

sympathetic agents in our Food and Drug Administration.

 

© 2009 Jonathan W. Emord -