Health threat from EU and UN: an oddly named UN bureaucracy is the driving force behind a larger European and American effort to take away our liberty to use dietary supplements in effective doses.(HEALTH)(Viewpoint essay)

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In the endless war between liberty and government regulation, we have an opportunity to win an important battle, one that will promote the health of Americans. This one is over the freedom to choose one's diet and food supplements, and the opponents are a formidable assemblage of world powers: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Union, groups pushing for a North American Union, and the large international pharmaceutical companies. The ringleader is an obscure, but powerful, United Nations bureaucracy with the curious moniker of "Codex Alimentarius."

This battle has been conducted quietly around the globe, without much media attention or input from Americans, other than those in the nutrition field. However, it has far-reaching consequences for the health of our citizens, in that these groups seek to heavily regulate the availability of vitamins and herbal supplements, and to radically lower their potencies.

The European Union has already enacted severe restrictions on the nutrients that can go into supplements. The UN's Codex Alimentarius group has recently followed suit, aided by aggressive multinational pharmaceutical companies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) and other groups can now force compliance with the new standards. And in this hemisphere, an obscure trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, called the Trilateral Cooperation Charter, could usurp our food and supplement laws even further.

No widespread problems plague the supplement industry, but the UN and European regulators, along with the FDA, are intent on looking for them and fixing them anyway. Groucho Marx was surely thinking of agencies like these when he quipped, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." What follows is a tour through the maze of government and supra-government organizations that intend to regulate food and supplements for the entire world.

What Is Codex Alimentarius?

Codex Alimentarius is Latin for "food code" or "food book." It is a global United Nations agency, comprised of member states, which establishes international quality standards for food and food products. It was created in 1963 by the UN World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).