One might even go further than that. Since the adverse health effects of nutrient deficiency are far more serious than the toxic effects of excess, the precautionary principle, if correctly applied, would impose wide availability of nutrient supplements, erring on the side of too much, rather than on the side of too little! Yet, as pointed out by Hanekamp, the application of the precautionary principle reverses the burden of proof for the safety of supplements, imposing on those who want to make supplements available, the burden to prove that their products do not have any detrimental effect. Of course it is impossible to prove a negative, so precaution, if focused exclusively on the possible toxicity of excess, will eventually bring things to a grinding halt, leaving us without front-line nutritional defenses.

" ... health risks due to micronutrients are habitually and historically related to deficiencies in the diet and not excess. This is so because minerals and the majority of vitamins are water-soluble and are readily eliminated by excretion as well as metabolism, the exceptions being vitamins A and D, which are lipidsoluble. The Supplements Directive in the preamble, states, however:

An adequate and varied diet could, under normal circumstances, provide all necessary nutrients for normal development and maintenance of a healthy life in quantities which meet those established and recommended by generally acceptable scientific data.

Therefore, in view of this statement in the Supplements Directive, food supplements are regarded as superfluous products that are, by default, only in need of excess toxicology regulation; a varied diet is more or less a guarantee for sufficient micronutrient consumption and thereby human health."

Incidentally, what is that "normal diet" and who exactly is eating it, remains shrouded in a dense fog of mystery. No scientific study has shown it to exist, and if you ask around, I bet you won't find many who say "yes, I have been completely healthy for years, and it is because I eat a normal diet."

Hanekamp goes further and explains how precaution is used in the legislative context of nutrition:

"Our contention is that within the precautionary context described above, the Supplements Directive is primarily focused on secondary risk management. Regulators and (scientific) experts in the main are being made increasingly accountable for what they do and thereby are becoming increasingly preoccupied with managing their own risks. Particularly, secondary risks to reputation are becoming as significant as the primary risks for which policies should in fact be devised.

The increasingly dominant regulatory culture of risk-aversion therefore engenders a food supplements policy singularly focused on excess toxicity risks, while simultaneously lecturing the Europeans to ‘eat a normal healthy diet’. Therefore, the directive avoids responsibility for the human health of European citizens.

Toxicity as a result of food supplements intake is a considerably more visible phenomenon, increased by the bias for negative information about possible health risks of products or activities. In comparison, deficiency diseases are not (and cannot be) related to any regulatory activities, as European regulators are not responsible for the individual dietary habits of European citizens, yet deficiencies have a far greater impact on public health." (Added emphasis is mine)