How the Dietary Supplement Labeling Act would be harmful....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 8-23-2011

We already know that the proposed Dietary Supplement Labeling Act would for sure be harmful. It would be a disaster.

This is NOT guesswork. The evidence is already in the public record.

It would harm the public health and dramatically increase the already too high cost of health care. Further, it would do so enough it would harshly brake our economy and cause further job losses.

The Dietary Supplement Labeling Act pretends to be consumer-oriented, but instead will give the FDA redundant power that it very, very likely will harmfully misuse, restricting the public’s access to supplements and raising the cost of buying them.

Since many supplements, now at relatively moderate cost and readily available, prevent diseases that are horribly expensive to treat, this is one of the most potentially harmful bills ever proposed in our congress.

Under this bill, the FDA and the Institute of Medicine must compile a list of dietary ingredients that could lead to adverse events or are otherwise deemed risky in some way. Creating a list of "bad" ingredients or "bad" doses completely based on arbitrary or non-existent standards is a slippery slope; for example, in Europe, the maximum dosage of vitamins was restricted to less than what is found in fruits and vegetables.

Moreover, almost all of this act's beneficial provisions are already covered by existing laws, so there's no need for any new legislation. Please firmly and energetically oppose the Dietary Supplement Labeling Act.

Mercifully, the evidence already in the public record, shows that these gravely harmful results WILL ensue if this bill is passed.

The once prestigious Institute of Medicine has already recently gone on record of ignoring the evidence and endorsing exactly this kind of harmful action.

And, it wasn’t even close. The once prestigious Institute of Medicine either totally failed to do the due diligence required or they chose to ignore it completely due to financial conflicts of interest or worse.

Empowering this group to regulate supplements and their dosages is like sending the wolf to the henhouse to protect the chickens and opening the henhouse for the wolf.

When our public health and economy are at such severe risk, we cannot afford to allow this bill to pass.

Please, make it a high priority to vote NO on this bill and to campaign against it.

Here’s why.

For about the last 15 or 20 years there has been increasing research done on vitamin D3.

People make well over 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if they spend time outside on a summer day.

Other research shows that our bodies use at least 3,000 iu of vitamin D3 if it is available.

One study of a health benefit found none for vitamin D3 at doses lower than 1700 iu a day but definite benefit at 1700 iu a day and up.

And, a recent summary of the work on vitamin D3’s anticancer effects found that the most effective dose for cancer protection was at least in the 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day range.

Incredibly, vitamin D3 is also heart protective, more important by far than calcium in keeping your bones strong, and makes your T cells so much more effective, you are more likely to survive a serious infection if you have been getting enough vitamin D3. It even is likely that autoimmune diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis are prevented or made far less likely by getting enough vitamin D3.

And, there is new evidence that getting enough vitamin D3 also helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

The evidence is so striking that taking 2,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is so protective in so many different ways, that virtually every serious researcher who has done any of these studies now takes that much!

Meanwhile early on it was found that a tiny dose, 400 to 800 iu a day of vitamin D, would prevent rickets. At that time people did things like walk to work or school or worked outside and played baseball summer evenings and weekends. So, it was only in the winter they badly needed vitamin D.

People today drive to work. Most of us work inside. And most people watch TV inside evenings and weekends.

So, the once prestigious Institute of Medicine was asked to review this research showing clearly that the minimum needed for good health for vitamin D3 is between 1700 & 3,000 iu a day and the optimal amount is between 4,000 and 10,000 iu a day and update the tiny previous standards.

Astoundingly, they didn’t read any of this research or were paid in some way to ignore it. That’s a grave charge. But the evidence is that overwhelming!

They basically kept the tiny original amounts and ignored all this research from all over the world.

Worse, they stated that amounts over 4,000 iu daily might be harmful. (Wikipedia is better informed. They show it takes 100,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 to begin to show harmful effects.) And the actual evidence is that 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is on the lower end of optimal intake for vitamin D3.

I’ve read that one of the doctors involved was working on a way to make a patented drug from vitamin D3 that would prevent cancer almost as well as taking vitamin D3 itself. This certainly would explain a lot if true. But that’s not the point. Their conclusion is wrong and incompetent and ignores the evidence no matter what caused them to do so.

Meanwhile without this horrible bill and putting such incompetent or corrupt people in charge of dosages and access to vitamin D3, you can easily go buy the likely optimum daily amount of vitamin D3 for $8 to $16 a month.

If things stay as they are without this bill, more and more people will take protective doses of vitamin D3 and we will have less of the diseases it prevents as people begin to learn about this new research.

Our health care costs will go DOWN.

Should this bill or one like it pass, and the standards for dosages be handed such incompetents, fewer people will be protected by vitamin D than now.

Thousands of people will get cancers and diseases like Alzheimer’s disease who would avoid doing so if this bill is killed now.

Why vote for that kind of human suffering?

And, in today’s precarious economy why vote for these added health care costs?

For example, it was in today’s paper there is a promising new cancer drug. But for just one person to be treated with it costs between $94,000 to 121,000 in addition to the doctor visits and time away from work.

Passing this bill would help us incur MORE such costs by the hundreds each year that our current access to supplements would have prevented.

Please do your best to defeat this horrible bill!

I'm writing my two Senators and am also getting this to a Senator who is known to already oppose this bill.

Please consider doing the same!