What are the major concerns with Codex’s vitamin and mineral guidelines?
If the Commission approves the proposed guidelines, it will establish a restrictive international framework for dietary supplements. Here is where Codex is, and where it is headed, and why we need to be concerned: A. Codex is developing “upper limits” (maximum potencies) for each vitamin and mineral formulation based on a risk assessment model used to assess the health risks for toxic chemicals and environmental hazards rather than a nutrition science model. The upper safe limits model, based on norms and population groups instead of biochemical individuality, attempts to set one safe and useful value for all individuals rather than promote an optimum nutrient intake level for each person. B. Codex is establishing international guidelines intended to apply to the entire world population from standards drawn from the nutrition profile of the “developed” world. Such Codex standards would marginalize the nutrient supplement possibilities of the nearly one billion people worldwide, who, by
