If you use vitamin and mineral supplements for health, you might want to fly over to Rome, Italy and crash the July 4-9 meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known international body that wields immense power over the global food market.

Source: © 2005 Peter Byrne. Peter Byrne is an award-winning investigative journalist. He hangs out at www.peterbyrne.info

If you use vitamin and mineral supplements for health, you might want to fly over to Rome, Italy and crash the July 4-9 meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known international body that wields immense power over the global food market. Should the Codex Commission approve the Draft Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Supplements on its agenda, 300 of the 420 basic vitamin and mineral products commonly used by European consumers will be banned from manufacture and trade inside the European Community.

The ban will seriously impact the export business of U.S.-based supplement companies and could eventually result in similar product restrictions being implemented here. The Codex story has received almost no attention in the corporate press and media; although badly garbled versions of the tale zing about in cyberspace, confusing many readers with conspiracy-laden mixtures of fact and fantasy. Which is not to blame the authors of these emails, since the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for "food code") Commission is so pathologically bureaucratic that its real intentions, and the probable consequences of its actions, are difficult to discern when wading through thousands of pages of jargon in its public reports. For example, it is not true that over-the-counter vitamins and minerals will be banned in the United States after August 2005.

There are so many self-interested players in the "L'affair Codex," that it is nearly impossible to get a straight answer about what it all means from any single participant. It is possible to piece together the basic story from public records, and by listening to what the various interest groups have to say (with several tons of heavily iodized salt). The bottom line of the story is that the emerging Codex regulations on vitamins and mineral supplements have almost nothing to do with promoting human health, and everything to do with facilitating the profits of multinational food and chemical corporations.

The Five Major Codex Players

From the point of view of the American health consumer, there are five major players: the Codex Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration/U.S. Department of Agriculture. All of these institutions are involved in formulating rules and regulations to govern the production and distribution of food supplements. It is easy to conflate their separate, but related, institutional efforts. The fate of food supplements is not dependent upon any one of these institutions, but upon how they interact as a whole. The five organizations are working syncretically to transform the supplements market, not in favor of the consumer, but in favor of certain multinational corporations that stand to benefit from the resulting restriction of trade under the guise of promoting "free trade."

The History of Codex and Their Guidelines

Codex was created in 1962 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) to "harmonize" world food trade. The several hundred regular "participants" at Codex meetings are drawn from the ranks of government regulatory agencies; food, chemical, and pharmaceutical corporations; industry trade groups; and non-profit "watchdogs" with various political agendas. To date, Codex has established 250 sets of rules regarding the manufacture and distribution of a variety of foods, from sardines to peanuts to pineapples, and including food additives and infant formula. (It is illuminating to learn that Codex has approved the use of cyclamates and saccharine—artificial sweeteners long banned in the U.S. as health risks—as well as Monsanto's aspartame.) After more than a decade of wrangling over political aims and technical details—far removed from the public eye—the commission will likely approve the Draft Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Supplements in July.

The Codex guidelines begin: "Most people who have access to a balanced diet can usually obtain all the nutrients they require from their normal diet." Vitamin and mineral food supplements are defined as concentrated forms of nutrients whose purpose is to supplement the normal diet when the vitamin and mineral intake from food is insufficient. From the point of view of universal healthcare, deciding exactly which nutrients, and how much of each, constitute a "normal" or a "balanced" diet is a large variable when attempting to prescribe a single standard across hundreds of dietary cultures.

But Codex is not about health. The guidelines define the minimum level of supplement use as 15 percent of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) suggested by the manufacturer. Maximum levels of use, or upper safe levels, are not to be calculated by reference to RDAs, but, and this is important, by "scientific risk assessment" based on generally accepted scientific data, taking into consideration, as appropriate, the varying degrees of sensitivity of different consumer groups and the daily intake of vitamins and minerals from other dietary sources.

The key phrase here is "scientific risk assessment." This investigatory technique is, according to many experts, more properly reserved for testing safe usage levels for chemicals and substances known to be inherently toxic or poisonous, not for evaluating nutrients that are known to be generally safe as ordinarily ingested. This emphasis in the guidelines, according to expert critics, closes the door on the possibility of setting upper safe limits based upon the benefits of using a particular nutrient. And by setting upper limits based upon the sensitivity of the most sensitive group—say, pregnant women who probably should not use a lot of Vitamin A—the legitimate needs of the rest of the population for healthy doses of Vitamin A are ignored; indeed, the masses may be forbidden to use more Vitamin A than pregnant women, except, perhaps, by a doctor's prescription. The "safe" upper limit paradigm is further driven downwards by the admonition that it be reduced in accord with the amount of, say, Vitamin A obtained from a normal diet. Under Codex, labels will advise the consumer not to exceed the maximum daily amount; and that the product "should be stored out of the reach of young children," (replacing a sentence in an earlier draft that required containers to be child-proof).

The Codex Commission, which is composed of voting representatives of most of the world's nations, has not yet set the exact maximum doses for vitamins and mineral supplements, but it is looking to the European Union Parliament, and other arms of the FAO/WHO for "scientific risk assessment" guidance in that regard. And that is basically all that the Codex guidelines say at this time.

Corporate Participants

It is instructive at this point to take a look at the American participants at the Codex Commission, i.e. public and private sector agencies, corporations, and organizations that actively participate in the commission's deliberations and wield considerable influence upon issues in which they are acknowledged to be "expert." Staff from the Dept. of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration represent the official position of the United States at Codex meetings. They are deeply involved in setting global standards, as are the staffs of food and drug regulatory agencies in most industrialized countries. (Codex funds "scholarships" for representatives from third world countries, many of which lack any regulatory bodies, but are still subject to WTO agreements and are affected by Codex regulations.)

From the corporate sector, official Codex participants include Amway Corp., Wyeth Pharmaceutical Co., DSM Nutritional Products, Mead Johnson Nutritionals, Bristol Myers Squibb Co., Nestle USA, Herbalife International, and a trade group called the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN). The latter's Web site features a "Myth vs. Facts" on Codex, which, to be blunt, is a self-serving spin that underplays the negative ramifications of the guidelines on mom & pop supplement businesses. CRN's membership includes Archer Daniels Midland Co., Cargill Health & Food Technologies, Bayer Corp., Wyeth Consumer Health, Weider Nutrition International Inc., Shaklee Corp., Nutraceutical Corp., Herbalife International of America, Kemin Foods, General Nutrition Centers, Inc., Cadbury Adams USA LLC, DSM Nutritional Products, Eastman Chemical Company, Mingtai Chemical LLC, and Monsanto Life Sciences Company. (A number of these corporations have several voices at the meetings, since representatives of corporate subsidiaries sit alongside participants from their parent companies. And corporate-funded lobby groups have separate voices.)

CRN had this to say about the Draft Guidelines—which it helped to write and of which it approves: "We in the industry have long maintained that maximum levels set by Codex or governments for contents of vitamins and minerals in supplements should be based solely and completely on safety, not on nutritional policy in general or the RDA in particular." It is instructive that the chemical formulations for naturally-occurring vitamins and minerals are not patentable, unlike pharmaceutical formulas. And the supplement market is huge—$16 billion a year in the U.S. alone. It easy to presume that pharmaceutical, chemical and agricultural concerns are working to grab market share through the back door: Codex.

Public Interest Groups

On the other side of the corporate interest equation, in theory, is the Washington D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, which along with sister non-profits from Japan and the United Kingdom has official status in the Codex proceedings. CSPI is funded by social engineering projects such as the Rockefeller Family Fund, John Merck Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A spin-off from Ralph Nader's public interest organization, CSPI claims that Vitamin A, Vitamin D, and Vitamin B6 cause a host of horrible diseases. The non-profit, which is a quote mill for The New York Times reporters, pooh-poohs the common understanding that a variety of foods and supplements are healthy, such as soy, Vitamin C, antioxidants, and dietary fiber. To back-up its ultra-precaution, CSPI refers to media-ballyhooed studies of antioxidants and Vitamins A & E which purport to show that these substances are bad for health. (Experts at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University say that these studies are deeply flawed, largely because they were focused upon particular at-risk sub groups, and did not take the needs of general populations into account.)

CSPI's stance supporting restrictive standards for vitamin and minerals undercuts the usefulness of an otherwise fine environmentalist tool, the Precautionary Principle, by taking the position that since a vitamin could cause harm to relatively small groups of people if improperly used, it is permissible to ban it universally, regardless of its obvious and well-documented benefits for millions of people.

Further complicating the mix of opinion massaging the medium is the Hoover Institution, which has taken the position that Codex regulations hurt "free trade," (a loosely defined, if politically useful concept that is most often employed to justify the expansionist agendas of monopoly corporations). And the Center for Consumer Freedom, a restaurant trade association set up to counter "food police lies" about the dangers of tobacco, olestra, trans fats, and obesity, frames Codex as the "global food cop." Neither of these two organizations participate in Codex.

Institute of Medicine

And then there is the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a quasi governmental body based in Washington D.C. that performs scientific studies on spec from government and private companies. It is under U.S. government contract to develop standards for vitamins and minerals that reflect the standards being considered by Codex. From the point of view of the scientific establishment, IOM is no lightweight; it is very influential at the FDA, and inside the Codex/WTO complex.