Ban should have health warning

VITAMINS, minerals and trace elements are vital components of the body. They are essential nutrients because we cannot make them ourselves.

They are very much involved in our basic metabolic processes and our body chemistry because they are co-enzymes, substances necessary for the activation and essential functioning of our enzymes - the catalysts that carry our chemical processes.

Some minerals, such as calcium, are structural components of our bones, and iron is the oxygen-carrying component of our red blood cells. Calcium and iron are also catalysts in other enzyme systems along with copper, magnesium, zinc, cobalt, chromium, vanadium and selenium. The thyroid gland requires iodine to make its hormones.

In previous centuries, we obtained these essential nutrients from our food, and we did not even know that we required them. This knowledge arose when we started to tamper with our food, for instance milling white flour instead of using brown, wholemeal flour, and polishing rice to create white rice.

These processes stripped the grains of the essential vitamins and minerals which they also contained and which were necessary for their processing by the body.

Eating such depleted foods robs the body of its essential nutrients and vitamin and mineral deficiencies began to appear.

These days the situation is further compounded. Chemicalised agriculture - the use of artificial fertilisers - locks up trace elements in the soil and, by not replacing them, as is the case with organic manures and composts, also causes depletion and degradation of the soil.

In 1992, it was reckoned that the soils of Europe and most other Western countries were 76 per cent-depleted, the United States was worst at 85 per cent-depleted, and Australia was best at only 55 per cent-depleted.

To make matters worse, food manufacturing and processing removes most of what little there is in the way of essential nutrients, and the majority of people nowadays eat a diet of devitalised junk food.

This situation is further exacerbated by the addition of artificial chemicals added as flavourings, colourings, preservatives, emulsifiers, texturisers and suchlike. This means that a large part of the diet of many people today is actively harmful.

AS if this was not enough, pesticides, herbicides, petrochemicals and other environmentally polluting chemicals increase our vitamin and trace element requirements because they compete with them for the active sites of the enzymes which the nutrients serve.

This means that at a time when the usual diet eaten in this country is totally incapable of supplying our nutritional needs, pollution adds to the burden. As things stand at the moment, easy access to these essential dietary components is mandatory.

The EU, however, in its wisdom, wishes to curtail our access to these essential supplies. It wishes, without any scientific basis, to reduce the allowable doses of vitamins and trace elements to ludicrously low levels.

Vitamin requirements vary enormously in the population, depending on whether they eat junk food or fresh food, organically produced food or chemicalised food, and on whether the organic produce really contains the necessary vital ingredients.

The state of health of an individual is also an important factor in their vitamin requirements. Obviously someone who is already ill requires much higher doses than someone who is in good health.

The EU wishes to calculate the allowable doses of vitamins and trace elements in the same way that it calculates the upper allowable doses of pharmaceutical drugs.

Such drugs are man-made and completely alien to the body. Many of them are based on natural remedies which have been modified or adapted to allow drug companies to patent them. They are not allowed to patent natural products.

Since these drugs have a certain similarity to substances which the body naturally uses, they are able to fit on to the enzymes which would normally process a natural molecule. However, since the shape is not quite right, the body cannot utilise them in the usual way, and they tend to block the enzymes, and hence adversely affect that whole metabolic pathway.

This is why all synthetic pharmaceutical drugs are associated with side-effects.

It is therefore correct to calculate dosages of such drugs by considering the levels at which they produce toxic side-effects and apply a large safety margin.

IT is, however, nonsensical to apply such calculation to naturally occurring substances such as vitamins and trace elements which are essential components of the body and without which the body cannot function correctly.

It is true that some people have experienced overdoses of vitamins, but they have to take very large doses to do this and the effects are usually reversible when the vitamin is discontinued.

This situation has occurred occasionally in the US, where some people go overboard in their zeal to consume bumper quantities of things. But an overdose of vitamins has rarely, if ever, been reported here.

What is ironic, too, is that the increasing consumption of the pharmaceutical drugs very often also increases our vitamin and trace element requirements.

Therefore, at a time when the drug companies are promoting more, newer and more powerful (and hence more toxic) pharmaceutical drugs, the chemical companies are spreading increasing amounts of pollution around the planet and the food manufacturers are encouraging us to eat more junk food, the EU and our own Government wish to deny us access to the very products which can help to protect us and repair the damage to our health.

This situation cannot be allowed to continue.

Dr Sheila Gibson is a complementary medicine practitioner and researcher.

The Scottish Health Food Retailers Association has presented a petition to the Scottish Parliament in protest against the EU directive.