animal supplement ban

[rjzuniga]

You Can Help; Urgent Annoucement

Animal Supplements Are Being Banned!

The AAFCO, working in conjunction with the FDA, is campaigning to take away your right to buy supplements specifically designed for your animals. This will apply to supplements you currently buy over the counter, as well as supplements available from your veterinarian. In other words, supplements will no longer be available to anyone—you or your veterinarian. Reports are now coming in that supplements are already being removed from store shelves.

As usual, this campaign has nothing to do with animal health or public health—it is entirely about money. And this campaign is being waged by the same people who don't care if by-products containing all sorts of toxic ingredients are the principal components of major pet foods sold today.

What can you do about it? You can go to the following page for more information:

http://altvetmed.com/supplements.html

You can write to your representatives and senators and the FDA
and the AAFCO and tell them you will not stand for this!

And you must do it now!

Your voice must be heard

[jpy]

There is NO campaign to "ban" animal supplements, but rather an attempt is being made to REGULATE them to insure accuracy in advertising and purity of product. Naturally a currently unregulated economic boom town doesn't want to see guidelines for what they can say & sell limit them. But that doesn't mean there is not some merit in the same safety and accuracy standards being applied to supplements as are for food and drugs. And for pets as well as people. (You bet it's about money...but who stands to lose here?) You can visit the FDA and AAFCO sites to verify no *BAN* is being enacted, and you can get a different side of the story from the so-called "alternative medical community" portions of which clearly profit from the current sale of unregulated products for animals. Read both sides, then decide for yourself on the merits of the case, not the emotion and wild rhetoric offered.

[MuchAdo]

>There is NO campaign to "ban" animal supplements, but rather
>an attempt is being made to REGULATE them to insure accuracy
>in advertising and purity of product. Naturally a currently
>unregulated economic boom town doesn't want to see
>guidelines for what they can say & sell limit them. But that
>doesn't mean there is not some merit in the same safety and
>accuracy standards being applied to supplements as are for
>food and drugs. And for pets as well as people. (You bet
>it's about money...but who stands to lose here?) You can
>visit the FDA and AAFCO sites to verify no *BAN* is being
>enacted, and you can get a different side of the story from
>the so-called "alternative medical community" portions of
>which clearly profit from the current sale of unregulated
>products for animals. Read both sides, then decide for
>yourself on the merits of the case, not the emotion and wild
>rhetoric offered.


If somehow the proposed regulations really would just suddenly make everything 100% pure and everyone would smile, great. But it won't do that. Most of the little companies selling supplements can't possibly afford to conduct the large-scale trials that would be necessary for approval, and even if they could afford it they wouldn't do it because of the necessity for the sacrifice of the animals afterwards (feeding trials almost always require the dog to die after the term of the trial).

There's a reason supplements (for people and dogs) are typically less than a tenth the price of prescription meds--the pharmaceutical companies must finance their research and development efforts with the sale price of their current medications. Since supplement producers are not required to do that, the prices are much, much lower.

My extended family owned a health food and vitamin/supplement store for twenty years and I grew up very well acquainted with the industry. Nobody's getting rich except the knock-off companies that feed off of others' efforts (i.e., "Wal-Mart Brand Echinacea") and some of the huge GNC-type franchise companies. The vast majority of supplement companies are not huge, and a good number of the herbal companies are actually tiny--if it says "wildcrafted" on the side of the tincture bottle, that means the herb was actually harvested wild and in all likelihood the company's output is not much more than a few thousand bottles per year. If regulatory efforts were forced, the good little companies that do the pioneering would go out of business, and the big companies that are actually profiting wouldn't hurt at all--they'd just find another company to knock off of or order from, and happily pass the costs on to the consumer.

If consumers want to be protected, they should take some initiative--if you're buying oil of oregano because of some radio ad, you will probably get taken. But information is available all over the place. If a claim is being made, look it up--good companies never sell something that doesn't have demonstrated benefit (many of the studies are European, but studies have been done). For example, Lucy is getting a tablespoon of flax oil every day while she is pregnant. It comes from a company that is unregulated, but has a good reputation for honesty and knows how to package and process the oil correctly. And before I add anything to her diet I look up the studies that demonstrate its effectiveness and exactly what it does in the body. And I'm paying $11 for a 16-oz bottle. Were that company forced to repeat the studies themselves, the cost for that oil would probably be five or ten times that much and I couldn't afford to give it to her--even though I know it's wonderful for her. So who has been protected and helped there?

I am absolutely aware that there are charlatans in the industry, as in every other. I would just rather see the prices stay low and people make good decisions for themselves based on research than have the availability and affordability be determined by an industry hardly sympathetic to alternative anything.

Joanna Kimball
muchadodanes.home.attbi.com