March 19, 2002
By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Health & Science Reporter

Hardest hit will be countries like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands, where current laws permit sales of a wide range of vitamins and minerals.

CBN.com - The European Union has passed new safety regulations that critics say will restrict consumer access to vitamins and put health food stores out of business.

Many store owners do not mind the new labeling guidelines, but they are upset about other requirements. And some believe these restrictions could affect U.S. consumers in the end.

After the new labeling laws go into effect, there will be new limits on how much of a particular vitamin any person can take. A new scientific bureaucracy will set those limits. They could mean the end of higher doses for antioxidants like Vitamin C. For instance, in France, the government won't let people take more than the daily recommended allowance — a measly 100 milligrams. By comparison, many U.S. doctors recommend 10 to 15 times that much.

So in the future, European consumers may have to get permission from their doctors to get doses much higher than the relatively low recommended daily allowances.

Manufacturers are also objecting to new required safety testing for multivitamin and multimineral products. They expect testing costs for each product to run over $350,000, and that will mean higher costs for consumers.

Hardest hit will be countries like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands, where current laws permit sales of a wide range of vitamins and minerals.

British critics say harmonizing the regulations across the EU will, in effect, impose strict German standards on UK sales. In Germany, vitamins are essentially treated as drugs.

Natural health advocates complain that vitamins and minerals should not be lumped together with drugs that have numerous and often deadly side effects.

Some U.S. vitamin watchers believe U.S. drug companies would like to see similar regulations in America, where vitamins and other food supplements have cut into corporate profits and control of health care.

According to the BBC, the British Pharmaceutical Industry's trade group supports the European legislation out of "a desire to ensure that the products that people buy are safe and effective."

EU Health Commissioner David Byrne also welcomed the Parliament's vote, saying the aim of the rules is not to ban food supplements but to provide "a wide range of safe products."

But how that promise will be fulfilled with more restrictions and higher costs remains to be seen.

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