Health claims on food must be backed up

Lets hope the EU evaluates claims for other products – e.g. patent medicines (earlier conversation), if it isn’t already. It won’t stop people buying these products, as wavechange says, but nor should we and at least they are doing so with more knowledge. I’m all for giving us the freedom of choice, providing we are not misled.

The approach is partly to see whether those making the claims have adequate evidence to support them. If they don’t, then the claims should be withdrawn. It should be the responsibility of a vendor to do the necessary verifiable work to show that their product is meeting what they say – otherwise they are misleading the purchaser. Whether in practice a product does prove to be beneficial in the way they suggest, but don’t substantiate, is not the point.

Talking of evidence, any chance that Which? has confirmed that cancer patients are not being misled by dietetic advice on high sugar foods providing a good source of energy for cancer patients?

I would like to support the benefits of a product called Bimuno which you referred to in an article on page 24 of September 2013’s magazine.

I suffer with Crone’s disease and when I get an attack I can suffer for days with diarrhoea which makes me tired and unable to get very much done, despite eating a healthy diet. A doctor at the hospital I attend suggested I might try Bimuno and it has been a life safer. Every time now that I get an attack or an infection I take a sachet or two of Bimuno and it gives me back the energy to copy with every day life.

I guess it dosent work for everyone as what works for one dosent always work for another but it definitely does work for me.

WHICH are taking this evaluation on health-claims on foods by EFSA as gospel.

The mistake here is that unless the evidence behind a claim has been independently assessed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and approved by the EU, a company will be breaking the law if it uses the claim, but does anyone question the scientific criteria used in rejecting these health claims.

There are many reasons why EFSA’s rejection rate for general function health claims has been so high, but the single most important one relates to the specific form of scientific substantiation employed by EFSA in its evaluation of claims. The Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation itself defines a health claim as “any claim that states, suggests or implies that a relationship exists between a food category, a food or one of its constituents and health”, requiring that the relationship is supported by “generally accepted scientific data”.
However, in its interpretation of this, EFSA requires that an unequivocal causal relationship between consumption and the claimed effect has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. This level of scientific certainty is simply not possible in the greater part of the field of nutritional science.
Something smells very fishy here, and I do not mean Omega 3’s, but the powerful influence of corporations who desire an exclusive market without competition for their wares.