Water ‘Does Not Prevent Dehydration’, Claim EU

Following the publication of a decision paper by the European Food Standards Agency, it turns out that vitamins, herbs and sunlight and water have got something in common. The link is that, according to the regulators that influence our access to healthcare, all of them have no benefits in the body.

If you have lived on the earth for a while, you may have also noticed that you get dehydrated if you don’t drink enough water. You don’t need to be a nutritional therapist to conclude that drinking sufficient water prevents dehydration. However, the communicat released by the EFSA last week declared that “the proposed claim does not comply with the requirements for a disease risk reduction claim pursuant to Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No. 1924/2006.” So there you have it. Water can no longer prevent dehydration as it is not licensed to do so.

Although no-one is expected to take this seriously, the declaration was a symptom of a more insidious problem within our health regulators and the government-pharmaceutical-media complex in general in dealing with the healing properties of foods and nutrients.

Contrary to the laws of evolution science and common sense, the regulators (in the UK, this means the Food Standards Agency and the Medical and Health Regulatory Authority) do not accept that vitamins, minerals or herbs can help the body. Moreover, their official stance is that no natural compound has any effect in the body; only drugs that have completed a range of specially-designed trials can do so. If it has a therapeutic effect, it’s a drug.

This is why retailers land themselves in hot water if they list a health claim on the packaging of their product or at the point of sale. It does not make any difference if the claim is true or not; they will be still face the threat of prosecution for ‘selling drugs without a licence’. In 2004, Asda were taken to court by Swindon County Council for selling mangoes with and attached message saying that beta-carotene and Vitamin C helped prevent cancer. Although this is not disputed, the Food Labelling regulations of 1996 prohibit such information from being listed.

Manufacturers and retailers of foods and supplements cannot legally tell their consumers that Vitamin D3 may improve their metabolism, mood, bone health, insulin sensitivity or cancer risk. It may have 51,000 scientific papers detailing it’s effects in the human body but it’s a natural substance, not a drug. So the official line is that it cannot help, and anyone selling a product that mentions any of the benefits found in such studies will be prosecuted.

The stupidity doesn’t stop there though. It appears that our regulators live in a parallel universe where not only do such nutrients do absolutely nothing in the body, the same nutrients are also dangerous. The EU has waged war on natural heath products through the introduction of the Herbal Medicines Products Directive (THMPD), which is currently being rolled out and affects the availability of many popular herbs. The threat of further legislation in the form of Codex Alimentarius, which threatens to ban all therapeutic dosages of vitamins and minerals, still looms.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the executives overseeing this nonsensical and inconsistent war are stupid. They are not; the war against natural healthcare is deliberate and sustained. It is being done so because MHRA are funded entirely from the drug industry and are staffed by the drug industry. As Jacky Law described in her 2007 book “Big Pharma”, the majority of the executives in the FSA and MHRA come directly from the drug industry or move directly into it. This is the revolving-door syndrome, and ensures that the regulators walk, talk and smell just like the drug companies they are meant to regulate.

And if there is one thing drug companies don’t like, its competition. And they especially despise competition from products that are a hundredth of the price, work more effectively and offer fewer side-effects. Despite a extensive availability of therapeutic herbs that have formed the backbone of medical approaches for centuries, pharmaceutical companies deliberately manufacture a . If they prevented illness, they would be out of business. If they cured illness quickly, they would struggle to stay in business. Instead, the aim of the game is managing illness in a profitable manner.

This is why useful herbs and essential nutrients are being threatened, while next-to-useless drugs with a huge array of devastating side-effects are actively promoted. Take the example of Avastin, a cancer drug used to reduce blood vessel growth in cancer tissues. Studies show the drug is capable of extending lifespan by just a few months, sometimes a lot less. It also has a range of serious side effects, including death. Even the Avastin website itself says that “no data are available that demonstrate an improvement in disease-related symptoms or increased survival with Avastin in breast cancer.” In shot, Avastin does nothing but slow down the inevitable. The cost of a course of Avastin? Around $100,000. There’s a lot of money in cancer.

And herein lies the reason why drug companies, through their use of the media outlets and the regulators that they spend billions to control, seem so hell-bent on restricting consumer access to vitamins, minerals, herbs and other nutrients. They are cheap, come with few side effects and could put the drug companies out of business. If everyone in Britain boosted their vitamin D levels to within the optimum range, the drug companies would be bankrupted within months. Adequate Vitamin D levels has shown to reduce the incidence of cancer by 77 percent (Lappe et al, 2007). The cost of this change that would improve the health of millions? Nothing whatsoever, at least in summer. A few pence a day in winter.

Yet Cancer Research UK, the charity that features the slogan ‘Together, we will beat cancer’, maintains a stance that the public should avoid the sun on the basis of reduced skin cancer risk. This continued warning comes despite humans evolving in 14 hours of sunlight per day and despite the proven link between lower sunlight exposure and increased cancer rates (Holick, 2008). The established link between improved iodine status and reduced cancer (Abrahams et al, 2002) is simply ignored. Vitamin C has long been touted as a useful anti-cancer option and is backed up by a wealth of research (Moyad, 2008) the charity choose to ignore it. It’s almost as if Cancer Research UK are trying to sustain cancer in the British population. It’s almost as it if the executives on £300,000+ per year know that they will lose their cushy jobs if cancer rates decrease and public fear of the disease wanes, together with the need for their organisation. It’s almost as if they are working alongside the drug companies who profit from cancer. Actually, hang on; it turns out that Cancer Research have official partnerships with AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer and many others. They’re no longer working with the system. They are the system.

So next time you see a headline that screams of the latest ‘cancer breakthrough’, you can probably ignore it. Next time you’re faced with a cancer charity telling you to avoid the most efficient way of preventing cancer, you can ignore that too. And next time a doctor tells you that vitamins and minerals do nothing, you can punch him in the face (if he’s right, he won’t feel anything – you need calcium to transmit nerve impulses).

My rant is over. But the campaign against your health is not.

References:

Abraham, GE, Flechas, JD, Hakala, JC (2002). Optimum Levels of Iodine for Greatest Mental and Physical Health. The Original Internist, 9: 5-20.

Holick MF (2008). Vitamin D and Sunlight: strategies for cancer prevention and other health benefits. Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 3(5): 1548-54.

Lappe JM et al (2007). Vitamin D and Calcium supplementation reduces cancer risk: results of a randomized trial. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 85(6): 1586-91.

Moyad MA (2007). Vitamin C Dietary Supplements: An Objective View of the Clinical Evidence. Preventative and Alternative Medicine, 3(3): 159-168.

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