The Vitamin D Council also points out out that the new recommendation says that an infant and a 300-pound pregnant woman should have the same daily intake, which shows how totally absurd this recommendation really is.
There is, unfortunately, a hidden agenda afoot. A pharmaceutical company is developing a patentable man-made vitamin D analog—yes, a synthetic drug version of vitamin D. And Glenville Jones, PhD, one of the committee members who determined the new vitamin D guidelines and who is quoted as saying that under these guidelines, most people “probably don’t have vitamin D deficiency” and “We think there has been an exaggeration of the public’s interest in vitamin D deficiency,” is an advisor for that same pharmaceutical company.
While the IOM presents itself as a private entity, eighty percent of its budget comes from federal grants. The General Accountability Office (GAO) has a statutory authority to improve the performance and ensure the accountability of groups using tax dollars for the benefit of the American people. The IOM report was sponsored by multiple government agencies and administrations, which means the report and the IOM itself can be subject to investigation by the GAO. In addition, the GAO has previously investigated the IOM and their public health reports.
So beginning today, ANH-USA is collecting signatures for a petition which we will send to Congress. We will be asking Congress to do two things:
Appoint a new scientific panel to look at all the vitamin D data, including the research from Harvard, the Vitamin D Council, and the fifteen reviewers whose research was suppressed by the FNB. The panel needs to look at all the studies, whether they were Randomized Controlled Trials or not, to see if there is a correlation between vitamin D and health benefits other than bone health, and specifically review whether it was appropriate to lower target serum levels based on limited evidence related to bone health alone. They also need to investigate how the IOM selected upper limits even while admitting there was a lack of evidence to support their findings.
Ask the GAO to investigate the IOM’s behavior in the creation of this report. The GAO needs to find out why the opinions of the fifteen vitamin D experts were suppressed, and examine the relationship between the scientist on the IOM panel and the pharmaceutical company for whom he is a consultant. They also need to investigate the IOM’s Office of News and Public Information and its role in the widely divergent and inaccurate media coverage of the IOM report, in which many news outlets seemed to think the report was warning us about the “dangers” of vitamin D when in fact the FNB had raised the recommended daily allowance by 300%.
Post Edited (Meemers) : 12/26/2010 9:09:35 AM (GMT-7)