EXTREME CUISINE: Haydn Shaughnessy argues that the world of conventional medicine needs to start taking the food supplements business seriously
One important element missing from the recent deluge of press coverage on food supplements prompted by the EU's attempts to limit their sale, is the fact that the EU, at least, takes supplements seriously.
The reason vitamin, mineral, enzyme and similar supplements have been so widely available in Ireland is that, here, medical science is dismissive of their medical impact.
The EU's Food Supplements Directive, which the European Court of Justice ruled legal earlier this month, is a piece of harmonising legislation. In other words, it introduces nothing essentially new to the broad range of legislation already existing in different European countries.
Its purpose is to create common ground between the member states' treatment of supplements. What this does, paradoxically, is introduce into Ireland a serious attitude towards vitamins and minerals, one that's been sadly lacking.
The health supplements business and the medical mainstream ought to respond in kind. There is no point complaining about the EU legislation but equally no point in being dismissive of the health benefits of supplements.
In Germany, supplements are used in cancer care clinics such as the BioMed Kliniek in Bad Bergzabern, where director Dieter Hager is a respected oncologist who combines numerous therapeutic approaches including the use of antioxidants and nutrition in his cancer care programmes. In the US, vitamin C is being used in an official cancer cure clinical trial supported by the National Institutes for Health. In New York, the respected Presbyterian Hospital, University of Columbia, is running a cancer cure trial using digestive enzymes and two distinct nutritional regimes (one is vegetarian, the other meat-protein based).
The anti-cancer drug Herceptin has created considerable interest in the oncology community because of its recently proven power to reduce the recurrence of tumours in breast cancer patients. Its effectiveness, however, is less potent than that of two more natural alternatives - sunshine and exercise - both of which have been shown to have a hugely positive impact on breast cancer survival. Of course, there is no incentive for anybody to market the beneficial effects of the sun, so the study that demonstrates this effect, undertaken by researchers from Harvard University, has caused not one ripple in oncology.
Nonetheless, mainstream centres of excellence are now taking up the cause of natural cures.
And there are trials taking place where one of the sun's health benefits have been captured in tablet form - vitamin D3. Some breast cancer patients in Ireland are being treated with calcium and vitamin D3 supplements to see if the bone-strengthening quality of calcium (which needs vitamin D3 to support absorption) will increase survival by making the bone less vulnerable to invasion by residual cancer cells.
So the use of nutrition and supplementation is going mainstream. And here lies the rub.
Eventually the success of the alternative health community is bound to alter how the value of alternative therapies are perceived (this has happened) and then administered (this is happening). Despite the bravado and braggadocio of conventional medicine, and its apparently unbending impatience with "alternatives", a growing number of highly skilled doctors now realise there is more in this supplements stuff than expensive placebos.
They are turning to the benefits of supplements in major areas of chronic disease. Once supplements gain full acceptance as a medicine then surely the mainstream medical community has a rightful claim on their administration. Or does it?
The unspoken battle lines between alternative and mainstream medicine have been drawn.The view of the alternative medical scene: having spent billions on advanced technology, the techno-quacks in conventional medicine now expect to take over all the work we've been doing in supplements for the past 50 years. The view of conventional medicine: no way are we going to concede ground to a bunch of pretenders who don't even have a proper education.
Yet retailers at health food stores have built up decades of expertise.
Erica Murray, who has been oft quoted on the supplements directive, says retail health food stores have a clear protocol. When customers ask for remedies, the supplement retailer should ask if the customer has sought the advice of a doctor and, if not, tell them that's where they should go.
Still, the question that the supplements business is not asking, publicly, is how it should respond to a medical world that it has slowly, painfully managed to convert.
But just as mainstream doctors of any intellectual substance now acknowledge the curative benefit of supplements, so alternative practitioners privately realise the answer lies in finding common ground with their former antagonists. The legislation may well get in the way.
You can read more of Haydn Shaughnessy's views on food and health at www.lovelifelovefood.com.