The post Action Alert: FTC Outlaws Green Product first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post Victory for Supplements—and Free Speech—in Bayer Case first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post Breaking News: POM’s “David and Goliath” Victory over Coca-Cola first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

But the battle to protect health speech goes on both in Europe and America.

Throughout the EU, the terms “probiotic,” “prebiotic,” “superfood,” and “antioxidant,” when used in relation to commercial food products or supplements, are now illegal….The European Commission believes that terms like “microorganisms” or “bacteria” is a more accurate way of referring to bacteria associated with the human gut that we have long called probiotics, despite the fact that some bacteria may be harmful or even pathogenic….

The Commission is equally concerned about how terms like “superfood” might mislead consumers and affect their buying practices. Any commercial operator that now uses this long popular term to suggest that pomegranate, goji berries, chia seeds, mango, blackberries, or green tea are somehow better for us than white flour or sugar or any number of processed foods, is now engaged in a criminal act in the EU. The same goes for the term “antioxidant” when used to refer to vitamins or polyphenol-rich fruits, vegetables or herbs.

Furthermore, under the EU Food and Supplements Directive, it’s illegal for doctors to communicate the benefits or health claims of any food, supplement, or non-drug product to patients. As Dr. Verkerk shared in an interview with LaLeva.org,

So for example, though we have a very substantial problem in our society with consumption of inappropriate foods, to say that taking Omega 3 fatty acids are good for ADHD children, would be illegal. Yet that may be a very important and fundamental piece of advice a practitioner needs to give to their client or patient. Unless your product is licensed as a medicine, you are not allowed to talk about its benefits, even if it is a food.

You may find it difficult to believe that such a suppression of speech could happen here in the United States, given the First Amendment. However, your freedom of speech is violated every day, in ways that are written into state laws and federal regulations:

• You may not be able to share diet tips. You may be familiar with the case of Steve Cooksey, the North Carolina paleo blogger with an informal, “Dear Abby”-style nutrition advice column. The North Carolina Board of Dietetics claimed he was giving nutrition advice without a license. They literally went through Cooksey’s website with a red pen, crossing out any speech they deemed unsatisfactory. Dietetics boards across the country frequently commit abuses like this, limiting speech about nutrition by threatening legal action.
• You can’t talk about industrial farming abuses. Throughout American history, reforms to our industrial food system have been sparked by the eyewitness accounts of concerned activists (to use a famous example: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was the catalyst to the 1906 Food and Drug Law). But in many states, “ag-gag” bills have made it illegal to videotape or take a picture on a factory farm—even when an illegal act was occurring. These bills are simply meant to protect illegal or unethical operations from consumers’ prying eyes, and help perpetuate the sickening industrial CAFO system.
• Your doctor can’t tell you about natural treatments…. In Kentucky, doctors can’t discuss chelation therapy with their patients. In California, natural treatments for cancer have for many years been illegal, so a doctor can get in serious trouble just mentioning them. As you can see, your freedom of speech and your freedom to choose the treatments, supplements, foods, and practitioners you prefer are closely intertwined.
• …or what’s making you sick. Fracking can contaminate the water table and air with such toxic chemicals as benzene, toluene, etylbenzene, xylene, barium, and radium. A Pennsylvania law allows physicians to access information about the proprietary chemicals used by fracking companies when they sicken patients—but they must sign a confidentiality agreement that they won’t tell anyone else—not their patients, not other doctors—what’s in those formulas. Plain and simple, this places restrictions on what doctors can tell sick patients about their condition.
• A Facebook “Like” can magically turn a supplement into a drug… In 2013, the FDA issued warning letters to supplement company AMARC Enterprises because it “liked” a Facebook customer testimonial about how their product helped “keep cancer at bay.” FDA says this means AMARC made a disease claim (according to FDA regulatory-speak, a disease claim turns a supplement into a drug). Are companies now responsible for customer comments on social media pages, an increasingly important form of communication and interaction between companies and the public? If a company stops allowing customer comments that might get it in hot water with the FDA, then the FDA has effectively censored consumer speech.
• …and quoting scientific studies can, too. Current FDA regulations prohibit dietary supplement manufacturers and food producers from referring to any scientific studies on the health benefits of a food or natural substance. In the FDA’s view, even providing a link on a website to a study converts a healthful fruit or nut into an unapproved new drug—a bizarre result that effectively censors scientific information and greatly restricts consumer access to scientific research.

It’s vital that we remain consistently vigilant against these piecemeal attempts to violate the First Amendment. By maintaining our freedom of speech, we maintain our ability to speak out against our government and Big Business, share important information about the products we buy and the treatments we use, and protect communication between patients and doctors, as well as consumers and businesses.

It’s unlikely that the First Amendment will ever be repealed—however, it’s clear that our freedom of speech is being chipped away slowly and subtly, one law and lawsuit at a time.

That’s why proactive measures are just as important as defensive ones. For example, the Free Speech about Science (FSAS) Act, a bill that would change FDA regulations so that legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific studies can be referenced without changing the food’s regulatory category to an unapproved drug. This will protect access to scientific information, and will protect your right to know about the healthy benefits of food and food supplements. We expect this bill to be reintroduced soon, and will let you know when it’s time to take action.

Dr. Verkerk has always praised Americans’ fortitude in the face of Crony Capitalism. Compared to Europe, we have superior access to potent dietary supplements because—and only because—of consumer-activists such as our members. For example, in Europe, if a beta carotene capsule contains more beta carotene than is found in one-third of a large carrot, it is banned). Dr. Verkerk concludes his article by encouraging consumers not to give up hope, and continue to fight for what’s right:

We must do as much as we can to pass our knowledge to the younger generations who will grow up in a world in which the corporatocracy rules—and for which censorship over communications about healthy foods and supplements is rife.

The post Freedom of Speech about Health Is Gone in Europe first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• Added sugars revealed. Added sugars are any sugars (sucrose, fructose, etc.) added during processing. So while the sugar found in an apple would be considered naturally occurring, agave—a sweetener isolated from cactus—added to another product would be considered an added sugar. It will be listed as a subsection of total sugars, though expect a big fight from Big Food on this particular item.
• More nutrient disclosures. The panels will now indicate how much vitamin D and potassium are in foods (calcium and iron will continue to be listed). Listing both vitamin D and potassium on the panel will help underscore their importance.
• Actual nutrient amounts will be listed, instead of just Daily Values (Daily Values refers to how much of a nutrient the FDA recommends for the average adult). Since the FDA’s DVs are based on extremely low recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, they can be misleading; listing actual nutrient amounts will provide consumers with more useful information. This change will apply to dietary supplement labels, too.
• Calories will be in larger and bolder type.
• “Calories from fat” will no longer be listed. This is good, because it recognizes that all fats aren’t created equal, and shouldn’t be lumped together.

Neither good nor bad:

• More realistic serving sizes. America’s portion sizes have ballooned so much in the past few decades that serving sizes will be adjusted. For example, the current serving size on a pint of ice cream is currently only ½ cup; this will be adjusted to 1 cup.

Bad:

• Under the new rules, sugar alcohols don’t have to be disclosed under “added sugars,” unless the food is making a “sugar free” claim. This is a slight improvement over the old rules, where foods labeled “sugar free” could contain sugar alcohols without listing it on the nutrition panel. However, we’re concerned that the sugar alcohol “free pass” could become a big loophole for some artificial sweeteners devised by industry.
• Nutrition panels aren’t currently permitted to list fluoride content. The FDA says it is considering whether that rule should be changed to allow voluntary listing, or whether there should be a mandatory listing whenever a claim about fluoride content is being made. As fluoride is a dangerous neurotoxin, we believe all nutrition labels should reveal the amount of fluoride in foods.
• The FDA agrees that we need more vitamin C and D, and that the DVs for those vitamins will be revised upwards. However, they will still be very low—for example, the DV of vitamin D will be 800 IU (20 mcg), when the optimum amount is at least 1,000 to 5,000 IU a day. It is ridiculous to recommend the same amount for a tiny infant and an obese adult. We need to tell the FDA to no longer follow the Institute of Medicine’s absurdly low one-size-fits-all recommendations.

Big Food is of course all over the proposed new labels. They claim that transitioning to the new labels could cost $2 billion (to put that into perspective: Nestlé alone makes $100 billion in annual profits). We also learned from the Washington state GMO labeling push that industry wildly overestimates how much labeling changes will cost. Food companies change their packaging all the time, and for most companies, adding a new nutrition label would happen during a normal package update.
Big Food prefers that the FDA leave the traditional nutrition facts panel as is, and instead let manufacturers implement voluntary, front-of-package labeling, including voluntary GMO labeling.
To generate public and congressional support for voluntary nutrition labeling, the industry-funded Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (the same group that appeared to illegally collect and spend $7 million on the Washington State GMO labeling initiative) has committed up to $50 million dollars to “Facts Up Front,” their campaign to promote voluntary front-of-package labeling.
Here’s what Big Food’s labeling would look like:

Looks clear and reasonable, right? Except that it:

• Doesn’t differentiate between added and naturally occurring sugars;
• Provides no context for how much sugar people should be consuming; and
• Continues to demonize saturated fat, even though saturated fat enhances the immune system and plays many other important functions.

Action Alert! Tell the FDA that fluoride disclosure should be mandatory, and that their Daily Values are wholly inadequate. In addition, make them hold to their decision to require mandatory labeling instead of allowing industry to thwart the process with their voluntary labeling scheme. Please send your message immediately!

And if you missed our urgent Action Alert on the attempt to ban folate from supplements buried in these new rules, please take action on that now!

The post More on the New Nutrition Labels first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The IRS should not be telling us what we can and cannot say. Action Alerts!

 
Second Action Alert!The IRS has no business in politics or interfering with free speech. Even if you’ve already done so, tell the agency again to rescind this political gag order and protect the right of political dissenters and organizations that represent individuals like you! Please send your message to the IRS immediately—the deadline for comments is this month!

The post Let’s Not Give Up Our Right to Name Names first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Nonprofit Politics: Organization Types and Permitted Activities

The Alliance for Natural Health USA is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. 501(c)(4)s must “primarily” promote “social welfare,” which is defined as “the common good and general welfare of the people of the community, i.e., …bringing about civic betterments and social improvements.” (For example, ANH-USA works to improve public health by educating consumers about the benefits of a natural health lifestyle and threats to that lifestyle.)
As long as the “primary” role of a 501(c)(4) is to promote social welfare, it is permitted to engage in certain political activities. Currently, the IRS has no hard definition for “primary.” This is one of our concerns: while the IRS’s new rules would reclassify many “social welfare” activities as “political intervention” (for example, nonpartisan voter registration, which we don’t do), it reserves the right to define “primary” at a later date. We worry that this could be a backdoor attempt to ensure that 501(c)4s engage in political activities in only a greatly restricted way—say, only 0.01% of the time. This would essentially eliminate their ability to take any political action whatsoever. A decision like this shouldn’t be left to the IRS. It should be made by congressional representatives of the people.
Despite our main focus on public education (i.e., articles on how to keep healthy naturally and how the government and mainstream media work together to attack innovative doctors), ANH-USA is set up as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit for a reason. Despite the many advantages of 501(c)(3) status (for example, donor gifts are tax deductible), our mission is best advanced via direct and grassroots lobbying, which 501(c)(4)s are permitted to engage in. From the IRS regulations themselves:

Seeking legislation germane to the organization’s programs is a permissible means of attaining social welfare purposes. Thus, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may further its exempt purposes through lobbying as its primary activity without jeopardizing its exempt status….

The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.

The regulations are clearly contradictory. One paragraph says a 501(c)(4) may “further its [social welfare] purposes through lobbying as its primary activity” while the paragraph that immediately follows it says the organization may engage in political activities so long as that is not its primary activity! Lobbying is not ANH’s primary activity, especially since comment on regulatory bodies (such as the FDA) and related activity is by law excluded from the definition of lobbying. But the IRS’s contradicting itself in its existing regulations highlights the danger: what activity will the IRS allow? Why is it appropriate for them to decide this?
Legitimate 501(c)4 organizations play a unique role in the political process: they pool the resources and political energies of many like-minded individuals to advance a single goal. In the case of ANH-USA, we are a collection of natural health consumers, patients, and practitioners who wish to protect our right to unhindered access to the healthful foods, nutritional supplements, lifestyle choices, and integrative treatments we prefer, and to prevent government interference in our health and lifestyle choices.
According to Douglas B. Levene, corporate finance and business law professor at the Peking University School of Transnational Law, the goal of the IRS’s new rules may be to “impose a prohibitive tax on group political activities that would not be imposed if the group’s members engaged in them individually. This appears to be a straight-up violation of the First Amendment.”

What’s at Stake: Meaningful Political Dialogue

501(c)(4)s serve as the boots- and ears-on-the-ground for concerned citizens. We serve as your voice on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, and at high-level agency meetings. We work to stop the bills and regulations that would, for example, prevent your access to healthy foods and dietary supplements. A summary of the threats we have faced in recent years and our accomplishments in fighting off those threats is available here.
By limiting the political activities of 501(c)(4)s, the only remaining political influences will be the huge industries (Big Pharma, Big Agro, and Big Biotech included), unions, and other special interests that can afford to make enormous political contributions and hire expensive lobbyists. In 2013 alone, PhRMA—the leading advocacy organization for the drug industry—spent nearly $14 million in lobbying expenditures.

501(c)(4) Abuse: Will the IRS’s New Rules Help?

As many of our readers pointed out, the exploitation of 501(c)(4) status is of serious concern. However, the IRS’s new rules will not stop abuse—it will simply threaten your right to be heard and represented by grassroots organizations. In addition, the new rules only address 501(c)(4) nonprofits, ignoring 501(c)(6) and 501(c)(3) organizations, which can also be abused. Those who wish to abuse the tax-exempt framework will simply move to other tax-exempt categories.
Even the IRS doesn’t think the new rules will work. In the words of former Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, even if new IRS rules concerning 501(c)(4)s were implemented, “We would have a hard time parsing what’s [directly engaging in electoral] politics and what’s not.”
The IRS’s new rules also address the wrong kind of political activity. For example, ANH-USA doesn’t take positions on candidates during elections. Our advocacy is issue-based, not politician-based, and certainly not party-based. We are completely nonpartisan and have members who support different parties.
This means we support or criticize the individual decisions of elected representatives. We don’t “bet on a horse” hoping they remember us once their seat is secure. The IRS seems to be primarily concerned with campaign spending, but these new rules don’t reflect that.
The IRS already has the ability, the authority, and all the information it needs to ensure nonprofits are law abiding. It’s wrong that a powerful government agency, instead of exercising its current authority by investigating where facts dictate, would plan to remove free speech protections for an entire group of nonprofits.
Action Alert! The IRS has no business in politics. Tell the agency to rescind this political gag order and protect the right of political dissenters and organizations that represent individuals like you! Please send your message to the IRS immediately—the deadline for comments is next month!

The post Readers’ Corner: IRS Issues New Rule Censoring Free Speech first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

ANH-USA could be targeted—along with your right to political representation. Action Alert!

The post To Silence Political Dissent, IRS Issues New Rule Censoring Our Free Speech first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

This time it is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which is acting lawlessly and trying to censor science about natural health products.

The FTC’s new rule suppresses the publication in consumer markets of nearly all nutrition science, which science is evident in the totality of scientific evidence (and not in RCTs to the exclusion of other evidence)…. The [agency’s] requirement for at least two RCTs, at a potential cost of perhaps $1.2 billion, effectively rids the market of vital health information through an impractical and unnecessarily high standard and related cost.

The agency also violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), because it made the RCT requirement without explaining why RCTs are the only acceptable standard for so-called “truthful disease-related claims.” As we have pointed out before, there is serious scientific criticism of RCTs. They are not necessarily the “gold standard” of proof as often alleged. It is not just the way they are run, which is often flawed. It is also that by their very nature they are more suitable for drugs than for food or supplements, where many co-factors are usually involved.

Moreover, the RCT standard was not made through a formal rulemaking process, where the public is allowed to comment on the rule, but instead was set in place, company by company, via punitive consent decrees. Companies find it difficult to fight these proposed consent decrees because the government has unlimited legal funds and the companies often have few resources. Moreover, if the government wants to be punitive and vindictive, it can just keep raising one charge after another.

This actually happened in the POM Case. When POM publicly challenged the FTC’s new approach, it led the agency to launch charges against POM products. Does this sound like the US, or a fascist country? At the very least it is a case of government bullying, which is all too common these days.

ANH-USA has always championed free speech, and with your support and activism we’ll protect the public’s access to information about natural products—in particular, how they can be used to treat chronic illnesses and imbalances, and even cure diseases. That’s why this petition will, we believe, be so precedent-setting, and so important for people like you and your family.

The post ANH-USA Files Brief in Free Speech Case first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post No Free Speech Without a License! first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.