LIVING, THINKING + BEING

TADHG STOPFORD: FIGHT, FOR THE RIGHT, TO “HEALTH CLAIMS” ABOUT FOOD

Avocados have a range of potential health benefits, like improving digestion, decreasing the risk of depression, and protecting against cancer. Like cannabis does.

The reason for this is because avocados are high in Omega 3 essential fatty acids, and these Omega 3s are 'fuel for life'. They are vital fuel to make vital anti-inflammatory molecules (“endocannabinoids”) with broad health benefits.

Endocannabinoids regulate and protect our health. Angels!

That's why cannabis health claims are so crazy sounding - pain, stress, anxiety, epilepsy, cancer, sleep, depression? It sounds too good to be true, right? But, these are traditional uses of cannabis. So, Avocados are good for you, and cannabinoids too.

Omega 3s are fuel for your body to make some 60+ cannabinoids. Cannabis is a food that contains 180+ cannabinoids, and all the essential fatty acids you need to make your own too! But you can't legally make any therapeutic claims for Omega 3 fatty acids, or for cannabinoids, herbal remedies, and other ‘nutraceutical’ natural health products. And that means the public can’t make informed health choices in the market.

And that also means we, the public, are prey for pharma. Instead of being able to exercise informed consumer choices to protect our health, we live in legally enforced ignorance. It's a cartel market really, and hemp/cannabis (Queen of Herbs) is a prohibited food, even though Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, said, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food. For the physician tends, but nature mends.”

This is because our Medicines Act seems like cartel legislation for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the rhetoric of a ‘free market’ and ‘public service’, our Ministry of Health seems pharmas enforcer in the ‘health market,’ presumably, if we follow the money, because natural health products aren’t as profitable as patented pharmaceuticals; and because regulators don't care about sick people as much as they do the ‘economic activity’ that funds their departments.

While cartels are illegal in New Zealand, they are exempt when resulting from statute/political bias. This is an unfortunate situation, as it means that captured regulators and politicians can safely regulate markets against the public interest. In this case (i.e. the failure of MedSafe to permit health claims for foods/natural health products, and their treatment of hemp/ cannabis) seems a tort of law called ‘public misfeasance’. “The tort of misfeasance in a public office has its origin in the premise that public powers are to be exercised for the public good.”

In Japan, the government introduced a new category of foods (‘functional foods’) in the 1990s. Health claims can be made about these foods, and it’s grown into an $8 billion market sector that’s empowered consumers to take care of their own health.

Samantha Gray is the Government Affairs Director for Natural Health Products New Zealand, and she comments that the MoH will not permit all of the health claims common to other jurisdictions, meaning “consumers still won't be fully informed about the function of products on the market, and that millions of dollars of research will continue to be ‘wasted’, in that health benefits properly researched will not be able to be communicated.”

Why does the ‘free market’ in New Zealand always treat the public like stock units to be squeezed dry? And why does it feel like our public servants do not serve the public?

Eat avocados. Grow and eat hemp/cannabis too. It’s cheaper than avocados if you grow your own. (TADHG STOPFORD)  PN

www.thehempfoundation.org.nz