Vitamin ills

ALL IS not well in the alternative health sector. A raft of new EU legislation could see hundreds of commonly-used vitamin and mineral supplements banned and, according to the National Association of Health Food Stores, as many as three-quarters of its members could be forced out of business.

The UK, the Netherlands and Ireland have a far more permissive attitude towards supplements than other member states. We offer a wider range of higher dose remedies, in line with the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The new legislation aims to bring us back into line with the rest of the EU, forcing manufacturers to reformulate entire ranges and invest heavily in applying for new product licences.

Some products would be banned outright, leaving customers high and dry and shop owners struggling to fill depleted shelves.

The legislation falls into four categories:

The Food Supplements Directive sets out maximum levels for vitamins and minerals. It is likely that the EU will set the strength limits at around two or three times the Recommended Daily Allowance (the minimum dose needed to prevent nutritional deficiency). This represents a liberalisation for most countries, but a severe cut in choice for British consumers.

The Traditional Herbal and Medicinal Products Directive says remedies can only be licensed if they are shown to be safe and produced to high standards. Reasonable enough, you might think, but in practice this would force a company making garlic capsules to jump through the same expensive hoops (estimates range from £10,000 to several million) as a firm manufacturing a new pharmaceutical.

The Novel Foods Directive, which is already in force, was originally designed to control genetically-modified products, but is now being applied to just about everything sold under food law. Food products (including supplements) that were not on the EU market before May 15, 1997, can only be approved if a dossier of technical and safety data is submitted. There is no appeals process.

Finally, under the EU Medicines Directive anything with a physiological action - such as herbal teas - can be reclassified as a medicine. A similar directive introduced in the US in the 1980s was withdrawn after substantial public protest. In the same way, when the Canadian government reclassified hundreds of herbal remedies as medicines and struck off doctors for prescribing vitamins in the 1990s, a public outcry led to them all being declassified again.

Health food store owners and alternative health practitioners are now hoping that a similar outcry here in the UK will reap similar rewards.

Customers at Tullivers Herbs & Wholefoods in Colliergate, York, are being invited to sign a petition against the EU legislation.

Owner Helen Spath is relatively optimistic the shop could survive if the worst happened and products started disappearing from the shelves. But a bit of fancy footwork would be needed.

"We rely on supplement sales to sell the range of wholefoods we offer," she explained. "We could fill the shop with food from floor to ceiling and still wouldn't be able to sell enough to survive.

"If we lost the supplements we would have to come up with something very imaginative to keep going. But we are an imaginative bunch, so I am not overly pessimistic."

She is worried, however, that some of her customers' firm favourites will not be available next year.

Black cohosh, for example, which is widely favoured by menopausal women as an alternative to hormone replacement therapy, looks likely to disappear.

"Women have found something they like and they trust and it will be just whisked off the shelves," said Helen. "They will be left in the lurch desperately searching for something else that is acceptable to them."

She believes that EU plans to reduce potency levels are not based on safety concerns but on a desire for standardisation.

"Unfortunately they are standardising us down rather than standardising the rest of Europe up," she said. "This has got nothing to do with safety - people who take supplements tend to be very well informed anyway - it is just being done so we will all be the same."

Helen does not know what will happen to her business if all four EU directives are given the green light, but she does know that the time to act is now.

"If we wait and see what happens, it will be too late," she said. "I really don't know how things are going to work out, but I do know that we have to make a fuss now."

June Tranmer, of The Healing Clinic, in Fulford Cross, York, is also calling on her clients to make their views known.

"There is the potential for the decimation of the industry," she said. "But if people take action now, if they write to their MPs and MEPs, it doesn't have to be disastrous."

She believes that regulation of the industry is necessary, but that the proposed EU legislation is too heavy-handed.

"You cannot assume that because a product is natural it is 100 per cent safe," she said. "The public should be protected, but this shouldn't mean denying them choice. If you provide them with the right information, they will make the right choices for themselves."

Yorkshire and Humberside MEP Robert Goodwill couldn't agree more.

"It's like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut," he said. "The problem is that we are dealing with vastly different attitudes in different countries.

"Here in Britain, we tend to work with upper safety limits - the maximum a person can take and still remain healthy. In Germany they take the opposing view, working with RDAs (Recommended Daily Allowances), which were developed during the Second World War to ensure GI Joe got the minimum amount of vitamins and minerals he needed to stay healthy.

"The fact is that our limits can be ten or even 100 times bigger than the German RDAs. This is the gap the legislation is trying to close."

But Mr Goodwill does not believe the legislation is necessary. Instead he believes that people should be allowed to choose for themselves without an EU mandate.

"As long as people are not actually killing themselves, why should we intervene?" he said. "I have not taken a vitamin or mineral in my life, but I would defend the right of anyone else to do so."

Updated: 09:01 Monday, September 23, 2002