When it comes to regulating natural health products, who's got your back?

By Rosie Schwartz





Health Canada's policy of letting natural health
product manufacturers self regulate is putting Canadians at risk, Rosie
Schwartz says


What's happening to food these days? Vitamin-enhanced waters and juices,
fortified cereals and even chewing gum are all on supermarket shelves -
and all with Health Canada's blessing. Are these products even good for
us?
Maybe some are but there are plenty of products out there
that may pose a health risk and it seems like no one is paying much
attention.

Years ago, you could count on Health Canada to
be a watchdog for Canadians checking up on assorted issues and products.
Concerned about the possible contamination of your cod liver oil with
substances like PCBs? Health Canada was there to randomly inspect these
products and make sure they were wholesome.

But not
anymore. Now companies who sell assorted supplements such as cod liver
oil are self-regulating, meaning the onus is on them to test their own
products' purity and take steps if they're not up to snuff. Health
Canada will only act if they receive a complaint of adverse effects -
something that could take years to find out about - if at all. When is
the last time you heard about a company pulling its own products off the
shelf - unless they were concerned about a possible government recall?

Supplements
and other so-called health products now fall within the jurisdiction of
the Natural Health ProductsDirectorate (NHPD), which, though under
Health Canada's auspices, is an entirely separate unit from the Food
Directorate. But the division between a food and a "health product" is
not so clear cut. And this gray area between the two may not bode well
for consumers.

Ottawa physician, Yoni Freedhoff, M.D.,
points out just a couple of the many, many shortfalls of this NHPD in a
recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal entitled
Fortified food loophole or natural health product?

Freedhoff
points out that under Food Directorate regulations, food companies
cannot simply add what they want in the way of nutrients like vitamins
and minerals to our food. If any nutrients are to be added, there has to
be enough scientific evidence presented to justify the change. For
example, soy beverages can now contain similar nutrients as cow's milk.
Makes sense.

But the rules of the game have changed. Now,
if a company tries to get the Food Directorate to approve the addition
of various nutrients to a product and the Food Directorate turns the
request down because there's not enough research to back it up, there's
now a simple way around it. They apply to the NHPD.

"To
date, 32 foods carry the Natural Health Products Directorate's explicit
seal of approval and another 857 product license applications for
'health products in a food format' are awaiting evaluation," Freedhoff
says. As these foods can be found alongside regular items in the
supermarket, you sometimes can't tell a juiced up juice from a regular
one with no added nutrients. On top of that, these foods don't have to
have the regular Nutrition Facts box on the label telling you about the
basic nutrients like calories or sugar content.

Supplement
labeling is another area where Canadians are being left in the dark by
Health Canada. Do you have any idea how much in the way of various
vitamins or minerals you should be taking in on a daily basis? Likely
not. When you make a food purchase, there is information on assorted
nutrients, such as vitamin C or sodium, which tells you how much of each
is in that food. It also tells you what those figures mean in terms of
what you should consume in a day - the percentage of your Daily Value.

Try
figuring that out if you are making a supplement purchase. In the U.S.,
supplements list both the actual amount of that nutrients and the
percentage Daily Value (% DV). Not so in Canada. Why the difference?
According to Stéphane Shank, a Health Canada spokesperson, in the U.S,
dietary supplements are regulated as foods and therefore must bear the
nutrition facts table, which includes percentages of daily value.

In
Canada, surprise, surprise: Supplements are under the NHPD and not
subject to the same labelling requirements. And though there's
fast-accumulating evidence that getting too much of certain nutrients is
linked to a higher risk of disease, Health Canada does not intend to
amend its current labelling provisions.

If you're not armed with enough information, you could end up inadvertently getting too much of some of the riskier nutrients.

Don't
take supplements? Even within the Food Directorate, consumers seem to
be taking a back seat to the corporate world. For example, as I have
previously written about, Health Canada is bringing in interim measures
to allow for the addition of caffeine to non-colas soft drinks while
they assess the issue. And food companies can add folic acid - also
linked to a number of health issues at high doses - to products without
disclosing the amount. The information can be called proprietary.

When
asked about changing the regulations to allow for the disclosure of
this information, Stéphane Shank, a spokesperson for Health Canada,
said, "While it would provide information that some consumers would like
to have, in order to make something mandatory, the evidence needs to be
conclusive before such an amendment can be made."
Suddenly the evidence needs to be conclusive here. No interim measures when it might offer benefit to the health of Canadians