Attorney General Loretta Lynch wages total assault against nutritional supplements to protect pharma monopolies

Wednesday, April 06, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Attorney General Loretta Lynch, nutritional supplements, Big Pharma

---

(NaturalNews) The Food and Drug Administration has historically been the one federal agency that has wreaked havoc on the nutritional supplement industry, imposing rules and regulations that hamper, harass and strangle supplement manufacturers and sellers.

Now the Justice Department is joining the fray, as noted by the Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-USA), an advocacy group that promotes sustainable health through various natural means, including through the use of nutritional supplements.

In recent days, the group said, Attorney General Loretta Lynch released a video about supplements for National Consumer Protection Week (a quick read of her bio shows that she's a Harvard-educated lawyer, but there are no medical qualifications listed in her resume, so what makes her an expert in nutritional supplements is a bit of a mystery).

Since she obviously is no expert on this subject, we have to assume that she's relying on others for her information – or, as ANH-USA said in an action alert, "she must be relying on distortions and untruths she has been fed by other agencies of the government such as the FDA and Centers for Disease Control."

For example, the group noted, Lynch, in her video, warns consumers against "ingesting substances whose safety and efficacy are not guaranteed" via an FDA study – as if this biased agency is supposed to be the gold standard for nutritional research or otherwise not compromised by presidential (read donor) politics.

"Dietary supplements caused zero deaths"

As ANH-USA has pointed out in response to others who have made similar statements, the FDA does not do its own research, it relies on industry studies to reach decisions about whether to allow new drugs and treatments to come to the market. And most of those studies are done by the drug makers themselves, not independent (and unbiased) researchers.

"No independent review is done to check the industry's results, which has led to all kinds of manipulation and sometimes disastrous outcomes (see the examples of Vioxx and Avandia). And after approval is granted, the actual medicine itself is never tested, even though it may be manufactured in Chinese plants or other faraway locales," the advocacy organization said.

In fact, so-called "FDA approval" has never been a guarantee that a product is safe. That should be obvious given that, even when properly prescribed, prescription drugs are responsible for about 1.9 million hospitalizations per year and about 128,000 deaths, ANH-USA said, citing the most recent statistics.

And that is just for hospitals. Deaths outside of hospitals would greatly contribute to the overall total if those were counted as well.

"In stark contrast, dietary supplements caused zero deaths in 2013, the last year reported," ANH-USA reported.

In addition, Lynch makes the claim that supplements "endanger public health" because they allegedly contain harmful ingredients. Let's examine that.

Like all industries, of course, the supplement industry contains some bad actors. But even at that, supplements that may contain some unsafe ingredients are already "adulterated," meaning the FDA has a responsibility to remove them from the market and prosecute the manufacturers.

"Supplements are federally regulated"

Lynch also does not discuss the fact that supplement makers must indeed comply with a host of federal regulations and manufacturing standards and requirements (what U.S. industry doesn't?). These are known as "current good manufacturing practices," or CGMPs, and are intended to ensure that supplements are manufactured safely and that they are of good quality.

"In other words, supplements are federally regulated," ANH-USA noted.

Finally, Lynch said that many supplements "falsely claim to cure illness and disease." But as a Harvard-trained lawyer and long-time government worker (she was a federal prosecutor for years), surely Lynch is aware that both the Federal Trade Commission and the FDA both regulate what can be on supplement labels.

"By law, supplements cannot make disease claims—only drugs can," said ANH-USA. "Any supplement that does make such claims is therefore breaking the law. We don't agree with this law, but if it isn't being followed why doesn't the government simply enforce the law[?]"

The group concludes that, yes, supplements are regulated, are safe and are effective – just the opposite of what the head of the Justice Department is saying.

Sources:

ANH-USA.org

NaturalNews.com