Members of the health foods industry have voiced the need for greater global consensus on safety limits for nutrients after last week's EVM report released by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) revealed yet another different scientific opinion on the safe intake of vitamins and minerals.
The UK's Health Food Manufacturers Association (HFMA) said that while the majority of the report's findings are consistent with the upper safe levels already used by its members, in some cases the new EVM levels differed significantly from those of other internationally recognised bodies, such as the Scientific Committee for Food (SCF) in the EU, and the US Food and Nutrition Board (FNB). The industry needs to establish harmonised approaches to upper safe levels and appropriate labelling, said the association.
"In the absence of harmonised safe upper limits, there is potential to confuse customers, to hinder free circulation of products within the European Community and from other countries, to create unnecessary barriers to trade and to restrict consumer choice," warned the HFMA in a statement.
The association also found the report to be "flawed in a number of aspects of the interpretation of the science of safety to the extent that it could lead to unnecessary bans on some key nutrients and unreasonably restrictive levels being imposed on others".
Most industry members have disagreed with the EVM levels on B6, which differs significantly from other safety assessments (maximum 10mg daily supplementation compared to 100mg of total daily intake set by the FNB). There has also been surprise at the so-called 'risks' associated with vitamin C which can cause diarrhoea at very high dosages, but has benefits far outweighing any likelihood of severe side effects. Advice on nicotinic acid, a form of niacin, also raised some comments - too much can cause skin flushes, but is such an effect worth raising alarm for? Vitamin A and the trace elements copper and manganese also have different USLs in the report.
Maurice Hanssen, director of the UK's Council for Responsible Nutrition (not linked to the US organisation of the same name), said: " The industry has been working to upper safe levels for 18 years, and there is no reason to believe that products currently on sale are unsafe. This report will merely rock people's confidence."
He added that the press release issued by the FSA had been unnecessarily negative. "The release does not reflect the contents of the work. FSA was alarmist in a situation where the scientists are being reasonable."
HFMA, which represents manufacturers and marketers of health foods, supplements, herbal remedies and natural cosmetics, is urging the UK government to allow for further consultation on the report along with other international scientific bodies and industry.
The EVM report was commissioned to inform the forthcoming European Food Supplements directive but speculation remains as to whether the new levels will be brought into law in the UK prior to initiation of the directive.
"They [FSA] would like to implement two or three label changes based on the report," suggested Hanssen, adding that just a couple of labelling changes will be at huge cost to the industry and consumer. However both HFMA and the CRN pointed out that levels used in the most commonly sold single nutrient and multiple nutrient products are already below the new safe upper levels recommended by the EVM.
The report also provoked strong reactions from the US industry, in particular, concerning the safety of chromium picolinate.
"The FSA's attempt to raise dramatic safety concerns about chromium picolinate is alarming. I'm disappointed that this UK agency has misrepresented the large body of scientific evidence that supports the safety of chromium picolinate supplementation, which is affirmed as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) in the United States," said Dr Richard Anderson, a researcher from the Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland.
Voicing reaction from US trade association CRN, Dr John Hathcock, vice-president of scientific and international affairs, said: "This is clearly an attempt by the UK to set a precedent for European law on this issue. But it shows that we are in great need of international recognition of the science to prevent future trade disputes. We need to encourage the World Health Organisation and Codex to come up with their own numbers to supersede all the different levels."
Such a project is likely to be a long time coming however, but as the objective of all the expert groups is essentially the same - to gather the scientific evidence on nutrients and their functions and to evaluate any potential health risk associated with each vitamin and mineral - surely there is incentive to work more closely together in the future?