The European Courts of Justice today.....

[Guest guest]

The European Courts of Justice today.....

The European Courts of Justice today handed down its

judgment and the ruling is far from doom and gloom!

See ANH's preliminary interpretation below...

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg today

announced that it is upholding most aspects of the

controversial EU Food Supplements Directive, after a

landmark legal challenge by the Alliance for Natural

Health.

The initial reaction amongst many commentators was

that this was disappointing news, as it contradicted

the EU Advocate General’s recommendation that the

directive should be invalidated in its entirety and

allowed a positive list system for nutrients.

But on closer analysis there is a silver lining to the

judgment. There appear to be very significant and

positive details within the verdict which vindicate

the arguments presented to the Court by ANH and which

may be beneficial to the millions who use vitamin and

mineral supplements and key to everything that ANH has

been campaigning for all along.

At the heart of the Food Supplements Directive (FSD)

is the ‘positive list’ of vitamin and mineral

ingredients allowed for use under the Directive. To

get an ingredient onto the positive list,

manufacturers have to go through an onerous process to

prove that each natural ingredient is safe. With this

process costing up to or even more than £250,000 per

ingredient, and vitamin and mineral supplement

manufacturers typically being small companies, that

would effectively lead to an ingredient being

excluded, even if it came from natural sources that

had been part of the human diet for thousands of

years.

With the ruling from the European Court, coupled with

the Industry’s response in submitting large numbers of

‘simplified dossiers’, the wide-reaching bans that

were anticipated on 1 August, will now not occur.