According to the FDA, ANYTHING used to treat a disease or condition is a drug. Therefore, General Mills stopped claiming Cheerios lowered cholesterol and now uses the weaker phrase “can help lower cholesterol….”. Same for Quaker Oats. Had they continued advertising this, they would have been deemed drugs by the FDA and available only by prescription.
Therefore, you will never see claims of vitamin D’s ability to decrease your risk of the flu and other infections in print. The FDA and pharmaceutical companies, would argue, that there isn’t a lot of research to support this. That’s correct. You know what would happen, if somebody paid the money to get the research done to support it? Vitamin D would become a subscription only drug, made only by drug companies and sold via prescription. Vitamin C, other antioxidants and a whole host of other supplements have the same issue.
As a result, any effort to help people with supplements to become more resistant to a virus, is deemed “disinformation” because it hasn’t been proven by clinical trials. This is a strawman argument. The clinical trials if successful and published would, necessitate classifying the supplement or food as a drug. See the problem?
It isn’t that supplements are worthless, as the medical industry has repeated over and over. It’s that the very proof needed, would make the product unavailable.
The actual criteria used by the FDA are these 3 things:
The ingredient must be authorized for investigation.
Substantial clinical investigations must be instituted.
The clinical investigation must be publicized.
In other words, if a drug company decides it wants to study a supplement, does so and publishes it, that supplement becomes a drug. This is happening currently with fish oil. Which is being studied in high doses for heart disease. That research is unfinished but preliminary results show, substantial benefits. We’ll have to wait and see how that turns out because in the research they processed, the fish oil to concentrate the EPA/DHA and used doses from 3,000-6,000mg per day. Where your typical fish oil 1,000 mg capsule has about 400mg of EPA/DHA. This happened a couple years ago with NAC (N-acetyl cysteine). You may have used or heard of this during the pandemic. It’s a powerful antioxidant, that helps in repairing damaged tissue. The FDA deemed it a drug in 2020, due to a drug company studying it. Many users of the supplement, along with supplement companies, sued the FDA and reversed the situation as of November 4, 2022. While not saying it’s not a drug, the FDA’s position is they aren’t going to enforce the rule on NAC.
It is now happening to another antioxidant, NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide). The process is murky, since you can’t get the information from the FDA until, the supplement becomes a drug by virtue of a drug company application, clinical investigation and published. It will probably turn out fine because, the same is true for NMN as NAC. They were both marketed, sold, and used as a supplement prior to drug company trials. There are exceptions for that, but it requires legal action.
There’s always more to the story, than what you hear in the media about supplements, health, drugs, treatments or even covid death counts for instance. In my opinion, the last couple years has laid bare the media bias, toward protecting their main source of income, pharmaceutical ads. This isn’t the Walter Cronkite era anymore. Similarly, you can’t take the government agency’s word for truth anymore. The CDC is more accurately a drug company. The CDC holds the patents for and profits from several vaccines. We’ve also seen how the facts have been obfuscated, data manipulated (who died because of covid and who died with covid for instance). Or the “research” they referenced to claim vitamin D didn’t help with covid. The “research” referenced was a study of hospitalized covid patients whom they only THEN administer vitamin D. And lo and behold, it didn’t make much difference. No surprise. I know no one who would have said vitamin D would save your life if hospitalized with covid. That does not mean, vitamin D doesn’t lower your risk of hospitalization in the first place. Which it does. Although, the CDC isn’t going to tell you that.
If you want to learn about how to be healthy or recover from disease, you need 3 or 4 sources of information. The avenues upon which information flow in the US, are influenced by the financial support for the source. The legacy media (TV, Rupert Murdoch, NY Times, Huffpo, etc…), the CDC (which now receives about 40% of their budget from the drug companies they purportedly regulate, in addition to the agency heads being rewarded with top jobs in industry after leaving. Like Dr. Julie Geberding, who was rewarded for hiding the connection between the MMR vaccine, black males under 36 months and autism during congressional hearings. Her employee, Dr. William Thompson, and the lead researcher on the topic, confessed to Brian Hooker by phone, that they cooked the books. They did this to hide the effect on black males under 36 months, by removing the autism cases from the data and THEN publishing it, to falsely claim there’s no relationship. Which is what Dr. Geberding testified when pressed in Congressional hearings on the matter. Dr. Thompson has been banned from speaking to anyone on the topic, including the 5 autism test cases before the Special Magistrate, in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. After finding non connection (of course), no autism cases will be adjudicated ever again. Thousands of families have been destroyed by this.
Meanwhile, after Dr. Geberding left the CDC, she landed the top job at Merck (maker of MMR vaccine) as head of the Vaccine Division. Well played, doctor. Well played.
Everybody’s got a piece of the information you need but you must assemble it all to make it useful for yourself and your family.
Dr. Barrett
