Just a month ago today, at the Codex Alimentarius Food Labelling Committee meeting in Ottawa, Canada, the US delegate Dr Barbara Schneeman said that no reference should be made to "optimizing nutrition and health" in guidelines that would encourage "adequate information" on food labels.
A Codex Committee meeting - Image by Sepp
The Committee was discussing how the World Health Organization's Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health should find expression in the information we find on the labels of foods bought in supermarkets and - increasingly - at organic food shops. A laudable step, to improve our health by telling more on food labels, but alas, the food industry is not keen to put that information where we can actually see it.
Dr Schneeman and her employer, the FDA, were looking after the interests of Big Food and its cousin Big Pharma, when they insisted that optimal nutrition should have no place on food labels or - as transpired later in the same meeting - that even when a food has been genetically modified, such information should not be revealed to consumers.
The labeling of trans fats in foods was also on the committee's agenda, but for some unfathomable reason the committee could not agree on what would be the proper definition of trans fats.
For details of what transpired in the meeting, see the report of Scott Tips of the Natural Health Federation, the only consumer oriented body allowed to speak in these meetings of Codex on food-related issues.
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Codex Alimentarius has a history of dancing to the tune of big industry. The interests of Big Pharma and the AgroFood conglomerates are at the top of the agenda. The recently passed guidelines on food supplements are a step towards limiting that nuisance called optimal nutrition by cutting down available nutrients and dosages to the minimal levels beyond which we normally just lay down and die. So nutrition yes, but not too much!
That seems to also be the view of the German Codex Nutrition Committee Chair Rolf Grossklaus, who, as head of the German Institute for Risk Evaluation, signed off on a report that proposes to limit availability of vitamins and minerals in supplements to what most nutritional health advocates would consider starvation-level dosages. Grossklaus has also famously said in one of the Codex Nutrition Committee meetings that Codex "deals with foods and foods have nothing to do with illness", agreeing with the European Union representative Basil Mathioudakis that illness is best left to medicine to deal with.