4 March 2013
Dutch version available
Yes, we have to live with Regulation 1924/2006/EC. But that doesn’t change the fact that this Regulation is one of the worst, if not the worst, pieces of legislation ever produced in the European Union. Just so that we won’t forget what’s wrong with it, let me recapitulate …
1) The Regulation deprives consumers of an enormous amount of truthful information, vital for those who wish to be informed about the positive relationship between food and health.
2) The Regulation deprives responsible manufacturers of their fundamental right to inform consumers about recent and emerging scientific insights regarding probable or possible positive effects of food on health.
3) The Regulation will make safe, legitimate and useful food-products and foodstuffs disappear from the market, because manufacturers are no longer permitted to truthfully and correctly inform consumers about these products’ intended normal use.
4) The Regulation will have a negative effect on public health, because it will coerce consumers to use medicines instead of foods to maintain and improve their health. Besides that, medicines are more expensive than foods and medicines cannot maintain health the way food does.
5) The Regulation does not protect consumers against misleading advertising. Instead, it interferes with consumers’ freedom to make voluntary dietary choices on the basis of reliable information concerning the healthy effects of foods.
6) The Regulation does not provide consumers more health and safety, because the safety of food-products is a “given” under many other European regulatory measures. Instead, the Regulation will produce less health.
7) The Regulation is a bureaucratic and paternalistic approach to Public Health, serving primarily the interests of the European bureaucrats, politicized science and the shareholders of the “too big to fail” type Food and Pharma Companies.
8 ) The Regulation is antisocial, because it will stifle scientific research and development in the field of nutrition and health. This will cause a “dark age” since it will wipe out all traditional and “non-legitimized” nutritional knowledge.
9) The Regulation enables large companies to monopolize the food- and food supplement markets because it prevents new, promising, healthy food-products developed by small and medium size enterprises from entering the European market.
10) Soon, the Regulation will produce higher prices for fewer food-products coming from fewer manufacturers. It will reduce the healthy diversity in the food-products market.
11) The Regulation will dramatically increase the overall costs of Public Health, since it will compromise the health of millions of consumers. Eventually, consumers will bear the costs.
Bert Schwitters
