Consumers are largely kept in the dark about the potential health benefits of foods and supplements. Why? Because current law makes it illegal for food and supplement producers to share this information.

Today Congressmen Jason Chaffetz (R, UT) and Jared Polis (D, CO) have introduced the Free Speech about Science Act (H.R. 4913). This landmark legislation protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings about natural health products with the public.

ANH-USA has been working toward the introduction of this bill for several years. Now that it is finally here, we need your help to gain cosponsors and support.

At first sight, this might not appear to be a blockbuster bill. But look closely. If it passes, Free Speech about Science has the potential to transform the healthcare field by educating the public about the real science behind natural health. This is a small bill with vast potential leverage.

For this very reason, the bill will have opposition. It will be opposed by the FDA for reasons we will explain. It will be opposed by drug companies fearing competition from natural health approaches based on diet, dietary supplements, and lifestyle. Please do not let these special interests stop this bill. Please contact your representative today. Ask him or her to cosponsor this vital legislation. Take action now.

We all know that consumers are looking for reliable information backed by legitimate scientific research in order to make informed choices about diet and health. Access to this information is essential if we are to know which foods and food supplements really are healthy and contribute to good health.

The FDA mission statement says that the agency is charged with helping educate the public about health. The Agency mostly ignores this mission and seems intent only on keeping even valid science under wraps.

Drug companies are of course entirely free to flood the airwaves and print media with ads. As has been well established, the FDA does very little monitoring of these ads. In some cases, drug ads are highly misleading. For example, if you listen closely to a drug ad for antacids, you will see that they give an impression the drugs will cure heartburn but do not actually claim to do so (because the drugs do not cure it and may actually make it worse).

In sharp contrast to the treatment of drug companies, current FDA regulations flatly forbid food and supplement manufacturers from mentioning any link between a product and a health condition, even if the link is established by peer reviewed scientific studies coming out of Harvard and other highly respected universities. Any producer that fails to comply with this censorship regime will have its product declared an unapproved drug. Selling an unapproved drug in turn will lead to fines and even jail.

The FDA has issued many warning letters to various food producers to keep them from telling consumers truthfully about the healthful nature of their products. For example, cherry growers have been targeted and enjoined from referencing peer-reviewed scientific articles showing cherries’ health benefits for gout and arthritis.

For years, the FDA barred health claims about the benefits of fish oil for heart, cancer, depression, body pain, and various other conditions until a drug company paid to go through the approval process. Not surprisingly, the FDA approved version of fish oil (the only kind that can be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid and the VA) costs as much as ten times more than otherwise available, high quality fish oil.

In the FDA’s view, even providing a link on a website to a scientific study converts a healthy fruit or nut into an unapproved drug, a bizarre result that effectively denies Americans scientific information that could alleviate their illnesses or even save their lives.

If the FDA insists that even cherries must be brought through the full drug review process in order to make any health condition claim, why not just go along? The problem is that FDA approval easily costs a billion dollars! Drug companies can only pay these vast sums because they have patent protection and will use that patent protection to create a monopoly on the sale of the product. Result? $100 per pill in some cases.

Natural products cannot usually be patented and therefore cannot usually be brought through such an expensive approval process. The FDA knows this, but ignores it. It willfully excludes most natural substances from medicine.

Who does the FDA expect to pay the billion dollar cost of approval for cherries? The cherry growers? And don’t forget: the cherry growers cannot combine efforts to do this because that would violate anti-trust laws. And would we want to pay ten times as much for cherries if a cherry company was foolish enough to try to do this?

This is what we have called the great Catch 22 of contemporary American medicine. Doctors are afraid to prescribe non-FDA approved medications. They can lose their licenses for doing so. But with very few exceptions, only non-natural and therefore patentable substances can be brought through the FDA approval process.

The result is an FDA enforced monopoly for drug companies. Natural and often much safer and cheaper natural remedies are ignored. Natural medicine based on diet, dietary supplements, and lifestyle, which ought to be at the center of medicine, is shunted off to the sidelines and subjected to legal threats.

There are many things that need to be done about this. For one thing, we should not allow drug companies to pay FDA expenses and salaries. We should not allow drug companies to pay scientists serving on FDA panels or allow a revolving employment door between the drug companies and the FDA. In other words, we need to reform the FDA.

But Free Speech about Science is a major first step. It will go far toward breaking up the drug company monopoly and the drug company chokehold on the dissemination of scientific information.

Note that the Free Speech about Science Act provides a very carefully targeted change to FDA regulations. It simply says that legitimate, peer reviewed, scientific studies may be referenced by manufacturers and producers without converting a healthy food or dietary supplement into an unapproved drug. The bill amends the appropriate sections of current law to allow the flow of legitimate scientific and educational information while still giving FDA and FTC the right to take action against misleading information and against false and unsubstantiated claims.

Government (and especially allied drug companies) should not be the gatekeeper of scientific information. Consumers have a right to hear about legitimate scientific research.

As soon as the bill is filed in the Senate, we will ask you to contact your senator, but for now we have to concentrate on the House, where a bill of this sort usually originates. Please contact your representative today and ask him or her to cosponsor the Free Speech about Science Act!

Take Action Today. Help Us Gain Cosponsors for the Free Speech About Science Act, H.R. 4913!