In the near future, buying vitamin C directly from your local co-op or health food store could be illegal. Instead, you would be required by law to go to a doctor to get a prescription for these and other related supplements. This could occur thanks to an international food regulation known as Codex Alimentarius (CA), which recently passed in Europe and could be implemented in the U.S. by January 2010. CA enforcement is expected by the World Health Organization, the U.N. and, of course, the FDA.

Director of Law and Public Policy for the St.-Paul-based National Health Freedom Action, Diane M. Miller, observes: "The world is moving towards a global economy. Well-intentioned people, and some maybe not so well-intentioned, are at global tables making agreements that impact many internal domestic laws. They are not only making agreements that countries could eventually adopt into law, but they are setting global policies and attitudes that will impact decisions of the future."

There are conflicting ideas over CA's possible impact.

Craig Minowa, an environmental scientist for the Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association (with over half a million members), has closely examined CA for the last two years, a daunting task considering the massive size of the document. Minowa observes: "At the moment, the Codex has a loophole phrase that would make truly organic herbs, vitamins and supplements exempt from being controlled by the scope of Codex. That phrase simply states that if the product is 100 percent naturally occurring, it is exempt from Codex ... if the final embraced version of Codex contains that phrase, and at this point it does contain that phrase, it will actually benefit those companies that have 100 percent organic and naturally occurring herbs, vitamins and supplements.

"What most folks don't understand is that 99 percent of the vitamins and supplements you see on store shelves contain ingredients that were made by chemical manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Most of these ingredients have little to no government oversight for safety. The version of Codex that we endorse includes wording that would provide government regulation of synthetic vitamins and supplements, while leaving 100 percent organic, naturally occurring herbs, vitamins and supplements outside of its scope. We are fighting to make sure the final version of Codex provides much needed enforcement of synthetic vitamins and supplements, while leaving 100 percent organic and naturally occurring herbs, vitamins and supplements outside of its scope."

According to Steven Ferry, author of the book "Your Life as an Atom: The Planetary Showdown Against Corporate Greed, Political Graft and Psychiatric Control," these companies, through CA, are really "creating the legal framework that will force you to eat and drink toxins."

In light of this, we should ask who stands to profit the most from the implementation of CA before readily accepting it into our lives. Corporations such as Monsanto, Dupont and dozens of bio-tech companies will vastly profit from CA since the laws within the document will give them even more freedom to further develop and sell "Frankenfoods," i.e., genetically engineered, cloned and otherwise artificially-grown products. However, it will ultimately be the allopathic doctors and the pharmaceutical industries that use them to hawk their goods that stand to profit the most from CA since it will become virtually mandatory to use their drugs instead of natural remedies.

If CA passes in America without the needed loophole that Minowa points out, our choices in vitamin supplements and organic, non-irradiated foods will be profoundly curtailed. Keeping up to date on the developments of CA is easy thanks not only to the efforts of the Organic Consumers Association, but also to Health Freedom U.S.A.

nationalhealthfreedom.org
healthfreedomusa.org/index.php

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