Up to 5,000 common products used safely for years – including multi-nutrient tablets, high-dose vitamin pills, and minerals – are due to be swept from shop shelves when the EU Food Supplements Directive comes into effect in August.
Public Health Min
ister Melanie Johnson was attacked by MPs of all parties in a Commons debate yesterday led by Tory health spokesman Chris Grayling, who dubbed the directive "a betrayal to British consumers".
In the Commons debate, Hackney North and Stoke Newington's Labour MP Diane Abbot asked: "How can the Government say that all they're concerned about is health when they're legislating for people to drink themselves into a stupor 24 hours a day?"
Mr Grayling pointed out: "It will be legal for a teenager to go out and buy cigarettes that cause cancer, but it will be illegal for an adult to go out and buy a vitamin tablet.
"That is completely and utterly absurd."
But Ms Johnson insisted: "It's better to be safe than wise after the event."
The Tory MP for Vale of York, former Euro-MP Anne McIntosh, is one of 186 MPs to have signed a Commons motion expressing "grave concern" that pills and powders in common use are to become illegal. Yesterday she branded the legislation "discriminatory and unfair".
Meanwhile, British lawyers representing health food manufacturers and shops, led by a senior partner from a Sheffield law firm, appeared before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg yesterday to argue that the directive was flawed and "uses a hammer to crack a nut".
The head of public law with Irwin Mitchell, in Sheffield, Andrew Lockley, who is legal adviser to the British Health Food Manufacturers Association and National Association of Health Stores said in Luxembourg that his legal team told the bench of 13 international judges that implementation would impose regulatory costs on suppliers which would lead to many of them going bankrupt.
The new legislation outlaws health food preparations containing ingredients not on a "positive list" of permitted substances.
Only manufacturers who submit detailed scientific dossiers by July 12 this year proving their ingredients are safe would be allowed to escape the directive's provisions, and then only until the end of 2009.
But campaigners stress there is absolutely no evidence that any of the ingredients are unsafe for adults and say confirming this will cost up to £250,000 per nutrient source, too much for many small providers to compile.
The former style adviser to Cherie Blair, Carole Caplin, is one of the figures fronting the last-ditch campaign to get the directive on food supplements overturned. She went to Downing Street yesterday to hand in a petition urging the Government to reconsider its position.
