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The Codex Agenda

Allowing Pharmaceutical Corporations to Control the Fate of Vitamins

The founding of the Geneva-headquartered Codex Alimentarius Commission in 1963 represented a hope that the powerful corporations controlling our food supply might be regulated into putting public health before profit. Forty-four years later, sad to say, the opposite has proven to be true. Corporate marketing agendas have consistently trumped public health needs, over the objections of consumer groups, during several decades of Codex rulings on food, drink and, most recently, dietary supplements. It is possible that, five years from now, you will need a prescription for your vitamins.

And chances are that your expensive supplements will be manufactured and retailed by large pharmaceutical companies who, using Codex as an instrument of trade restriction, monopolize the world markets for nutritional products.

GlaxoSmithKline is the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Last year, the $45 billion firm, based in Great Britain, sold $1.3 billion worth of “nutritional healthcare” products. Glaxo and its corporate competitors, such as Netherlands-based DSM Corp., are racing to grab sectors of the “emerging” third world market in vitamin and mineral supplements and fortified foods. To achieve this end, multinational firms need the cooperation of governments, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and Codex.

Here’s a good example of Glaxo’s food-imperialism: Throughout Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East, Glaxo brands chocolate-flavored Horlicks as “a nutritional drink made from wheat, milk, and malted barley.” In India, the multinational pharma-food conglomerate advertises the Horlicks line of “extremely tasty” drinks and biscuits as suitable for breastfeeding mothers, people with diabetes, preschool children, “health conscious adults,” and quick energy-seekers. Horlicks, brags Glaxo, is manufactured “as per the guidelines of the Codex Alimentarius.” Be that as it may, one serving of Horlicks Light Malt Chocolate contains a stultifying load of refined sugars, carbohydrates and transfats infused with a mere 17 percent of the recommended daily allowance of 11 vitamins and minerals.

Within five years, corporations such as Glaxo and DSM will be able to tighten their control over the manufacturing and distribution of vitamins and minerals in all their multifarious forms.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission is a regulatory body chartered by the United Nations to standardize the labeling, packaging, safety, and quality of the world’s food supply. Although voting members of the Codex Commission are drawn from governmental bodies, corporate lobbyists wield considerable influence inside the arcane, intensely bureaucratic, years-long process of codifying binding guidelines that are fundamentally changing how vitamins, minerals, and nutritively fortified foods enter the global diet. It is instructive to note that Glaxo holds the officially-sanctioned status of “stakeholder” at meetings of the body in charge of regulating health supplements, the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses; (there are two dozen Codex committees, each with its own food-related domain). Much is at stake: Codex guidelines are more than helpful suggestions; they are quantified rules enforceable by a network of treaties and trade agreements adjudicated by World Trade Organization tribunals.

In addition to the 178 national state delegations that vote on Codex agenda items, meetings are attended by 151 non-voting stakeholders. Industrial food and drug corporations make up nearly three quarters of this influential group. Consumer and public interest groups are a paltry eight percent. The balance of the stakeholders—who are allowed to speak in meetings and to lobby commissioners—are trade associations. Omnipresent corporate lobbyists, such as from the Council of Responsible Nutrition, are attuned to the slightest deviation from the business-first agenda that, according to informed observers, has guided the Codex deliberations for many years.

DSM Corp. is certified by the Codex Secretariat to participate in deliberations. DSM, which grossed $8.3 billion in pharmaceutical and nutritional sales last year, cares about Codex because it is the world’s largest supplier of vitamin and mineral pre-mixes for human and animal consumption. On the other side of the lobbying equation is the National Health Federation of Monrovia, California, the sole American health freedom group accredited to participate in Codex meetings. The NHF assesses Codex as a threat to health freedom because, among other matters, it is setting very low maximum limits on the amounts of vitamins and minerals allowed in dietary supplement forms, especially Vitamin B6, Beta-carotene, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D.

Last November, the nutrition committee held its annual meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As usual, deliberations were dominated by the priorities of the European state delegations, which vote as a bloc. The Europeans easily overrode consideration of health and safety concerns about infant formula standards that were raised by representatives from Japan and Benin. And the agenda of setting low maximum limits on supplement levels was inexorably advanced after the European chairman, Dr. Rolf Grossklaus, limited discussion of that issue.

One problem with the Codex treatment of supplements, according to the NHF and other health freedom advocates, is that the method used by consulting scientists to determine the allowable upper levels of vitamin and mineral dosages is unsound. It is based on assessing possible (but not proven) risks of ingesting large amounts of supplements without taking into account the benefits of using a particular vitamin or mineral as it is intended to be used. Critics say that Codex is, in effect, employing the “Precautionary Principle” as a guide for assessing the safety of dietary supplements.

The precautionary approach is wise, indeed, when applied to regulating home and industrial use of chemicals and toxins that are known to cause ill effects to health and habitat (including global warming!). But conducting an investigation of vitamin safety on the premise of “guilty until proven innocent” is illogical, say the critics, because these relatively benign substances are known to produce considerable health benefits in supplement form. By chemical composition, they are nutrients, not obvious toxins, such as are polyvinyl chlorides and formaldehyde and alcohol. Vitamins do not cause harm, except in the rare cases when they are used in excess. (For that matter, too much water can kill you!)

When the Codex delegations from the United States, led by the Department of Agriculture, opine that setting low upper levels will only affect countries outside the United States, NHF disagrees: “We think that Codex guidelines and standards will inevitably supercede domestic laws, including the Dietary Supplement and Health and Education Act of 1994.” And that is because the agenda of Codex is driven by the marketing plans of major food and drug concerns—and the imperative to “harmonize” world trade in accordance with those plans—and not by the superior agenda of substantially improving human nutrition and health, especially in the third world.

Dr. Robert Verkerk, director of the Alliance for Natural Health in the United Kingdom, says, “The most pressing issue is how Codex will deal with risk assessment of vitamins and minerals, and then, subsequently, other nutrients and foods. This will set the borderline between what constitutes a nutrient in a food, functional food or dietary/food supplement and a nutrient used as a drug.”

Verkerk points out that behind the shield of “scientific risk assessment” the commissioners are working to institutionalize a global system of regulations that will cap the specific amounts of vitamins and minerals that may be sold in individual doses of over-the-counter dietary supplements. Codex consultants are using the recommended daily allowance method, which establishes minimal intake needs, as a basis for establishing upper intake limits, even when scientific analysis shows that there is very little, if any risk of overdosing on specific substances. And this illogical method of bracketing the nutritional composition of supplements may eventually be applied to low-balling the nutrient levels of all foods! Why?

The European Commission, which is developing a template of maximum supplement dosage levels that are slated to be codified by Codex, states: “[I]t is important to note that food supplements are regulated as food and are intended for supplementing the normal diet rather than having therapeutic effects. In fact, claims as to treatment, cure or prevention of disease would not be allowed for food supplements and would place the product under the legal framework of medicines.” This artificially constructed—political—notion that upper limits are needed for safety and medical reasons will result in chopping the world’s supplement and fortified food markets into controllable pieces. It is certainly not about stopping people from accidentally committing suicide by vitamin.

Hence, the cornucopia of supplements from which consumers pick and choose dosages appropriate for their individual diets and physiognomies may, one day, no longer be widely available in retail stores.

Within five years, corporations such as Glaxo and DSM will be able to tighten their control over the manufacturing and distribution of vitamins and minerals in all their multifarious forms. They will be able to dominate the manufacture and distribution of fortified foods—such as bulk refined sugar laced with beta-carotene—in emerging markets. And under Codex guidelines, stockpiles of food staples in under-developed nations could be required by international law to be fortified with minimal amounts of vitamins, because, ironically, the naturally nutritive diets of these regions is being replaced by industrialized, high fat, high sugar, low-vitamin, low-fiber, food-like substances, such as McDonalds hamburgers and Horlicks.

Trading on Codex-approved low-balling of nutrient content, DSM could, for example, launch a wholesale line of minimally fortified foods, plus a line of low-dosage supplement products for retail consumption, and a separate line of high-dose “therapeutic” vitamins, such as 1,000 mg tabs of Vitamin C, as prescription-only medicine for the rich. This is not idle speculation: DSM is rapidly expanding its fortified food market, reaching into Central America, the Philippines, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Chile and beyond with the help of United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-approved plans (published on DSM’s Web site) for micro-managing the nutritive content of multiple human and animal ecosystems. Meanwhile, DSM’s futurists assume that the diets of emerging economies will continue to become Americanized: chock full of sugar, carbs, transfats, and nutrient-deprived grains. Meanwhile, DSM (under the nose of Codex) is growing a global business that adds vitamins and minerals back into processed foods after these nutrients have been stripped out to make “tasty” products. (DSM’s manipulation of the food supply is being marketed under the guise of promoting “sustainability,” but that is another story.)

Also in documents available on its Web site, DSM, in partnership with USAID, reports that fortifying Third World food staples at 50 percent of the recommended daily allowance “reduces the need to provide supplements in pharmaceutical forms on a widespread basis.” This remarkable statement is revealing of intent because it predicts that dietary supplements are slated to become “pharmaceutical,” i.e. prescriptive drugs; and that they will not be available for everybody (“widespread basis”).

Meanwhile, Glaxo’s obvious marketing strategy is to continue selling sugary “health” drinks to third world peasants (who cannot afford to eat the whole foods that they harvest for export to the financial metropoles). Glaxo is also marketing more than a dozen low-dose supplement products to the increasingly vitamin- and mineral-starved masses of the Third World. It is not in the corporate self-interest of Glaxo or DSM to leverage their capital resources and political clout to provide the planet with a healthy diet, quite the opposite. And as collateral damage to their transnational marketing strategies small supplement producers and mom & pop retail outlets in the Third World will keel over from lack of muscle. In relatively affluent America, however, the political power of established supplement distributors may forestall, for a time, maybe for a long time, the liquidation of DSHEA and the demise of small producers. (The reader may or may not realize that we, in America, enjoy a very high level of health freedom compared to other countries. We have something good and it should be defended.)

In summary, Codex observers say it is highly probable that the commission will eventually codify a regimen of upper limits on the amounts of vitamins and minerals allowed to be defined as dietary supplements. These upper limits will, if the Codex deliberations continue to proceed in tandem with the current agenda, be lower than the dosages available in many of today’s popular health products. But because the biological need for supplement intake varies tremendously from person to person and from group to group and from country to country it is fundamentally illogical to set maximum dose levels on an international basis. For that matter, it looks like an academic exercise to set upper limits for any population.

Clearly, the Codex agenda is governed by the needs of the food and drug industry, and not the needs of the average consumer. As a case in point: Dr. Grossklaus, who chairs the nutrition committee, is an employee of a German agency, BfR, that is contracted to render scientific advice on vitamin levels to the Codex committee chaired by … Grossklaus. The chairman’s advice to himself echoes the public comments of the pharmaceutical firms that are powerfully embedded inside the committee proceedings—and they want low upper limits in line with the recommended daily allowance method, as does BfR. And BfR (echoing the food-pharma company concerns) wants to scientifically validate these low limits by treating vitamins as dangerous chemicals, not as proven boons to humankind. 

But an even bigger conflict of interest than Grossklaus’ is that, due to its umbilical ties to the World Trade Organization, the Codex Alimentarius as a whole has largely ceased to function as a genuine advocate for world health and has become a force in the fashioning of trade agreements designed by corporate lobbies. Setting worldwide levels for dietary supplements is not about ensuring public health and safety; it is about advancing the agenda of profit-driven corporations like DSM and Glaxo. Of course supplements are not the only target of the Codex Alimentarius regime: as Verkerk points out: Codex aims to regulate the nutritive content of all foods. And so do DSM and its cohorts.

* For a detailed description of the Codex Alimentarius, see Smart Publications (2005), “The Fate of Vitamins.” In a subsequent article, we will look closely at what the developing Codex agenda means for First World consumers.