A Nutricidal Codex

By Shannara Johnson

If the previous story wasn't enough....

Ever heard of the Codex Alimentarius? If not, don't be surprised. It's one of the best-kept "open secrets" of the U.S. government. It's scheduled to take effect on December 21, 2009, and it may present the greatest disaster for our food supply--and thus for our health--this country has ever seen.

What is the Codex Alimentarius, and how did it come to pass?

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1897 and 1911, a collection of standards and regulations for a wide variety of foods was developed, called the Codex Alimentarius Austriacus. It wasn't legally binding but served as a useful reference for the courts to determine standards for specific foods.

The post-World War II rebirth of the Codex Alimentarius (or short, Codex), however, is much more dubious.

To understand the full implications, we need to go back to the history of one huge conglomerate: The Interessengemeinschaft Farben, or IG Farben--a powerful cartel that consisted of German chemical and pharmaceutical companies such as BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst.

IG Farben was, you could say, the corporate arm of the Third Reich. Having lucrative contracts with Hitler's regime, IG Farben produced everything from ammunition to Zyklon B, the nerve gas that was used to kill prisoners in the concentration camps. IG Farben was the single largest donor to Hitler's election campaign... and later the single largest profiteer of World War II.

"Whenever the German Wehrmacht conquered another country, IG Farben followed, systematically taking over the industries of those countries," states the website of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation, a non-profit promoter of natural health. "The U.S. government investigation of the factors that led to the Second World War in 1946 came to the conclusion that without IG Farben the Second World War would simply not have been possible."

Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous German concentration camp, also benefited IG Farben. New, unsafe pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines were liberally tested on Auschwitz prisoners--many of which died during the tests.

Not surprising, the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal prosecuted 24 IG Farben board members and executives for mass murder, slavery and other crimes against humanity. One of those convicted was Fritz ter Meer, the highest-ranking scientist on the executive board of IG Farben, who was sentenced to seven years in prison (of which he only served four). When asked during trial whether he thought those human experiments had been justified, he answered that "concentration camp prisoners were not subjected to exceptional suffering, because they would have been killed anyway."

In 1955, ter Meer was reinstated as a member of the supervisory board at Bayer and one year later became its chairman. In 1962, together with other executives of BASF, Bayer and Hoechst, he was one of the main architects of the Codex Alimentarius.

"When he got out of jail, he went to his UN buddies," said Dr. Rima Laibow, MD, in a passionate speech at the 2005 conference of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals (NANP). "And he said, '[...] If we take over food worldwide, we have power worldwide.'"

The result was the creation of a trade commission called the Codex Alimentarius Commission, now funded and run by the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

At its foundation in 1994, the World Trade Organization (WTO) accepted the standards of the Codex--and by the end of 2009, all member countries of the WTO will be required to implement the Codex, "to harmonize the standards" for the global trade of foods.

In the U.S. meanwhile, Congress passed the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act (DSHEA) in 1994, which defined vitamins, minerals and herbs as foods, therefore not to be regulated by pharmaceutical standards. The Codex Alimentarius would reverse all that. It would treat those dietary supplements not as foods, but as toxins.

"How do you protect somebody from a poison?" asks Laibow. "You use toxicology. You use a science called 'risk assessment.'"

Risk assessment, she explains, works as follows. You take the toxin in question, feed it to lab animals and "determine the dose that kills 50% of them. That's called the LD 50. And you extrapolate what the LD 50 for a human being might be. Then you go down to the other end of the dosage range and you start feeding [little] bits of it to test animals, and you come up with the largest possible dose--the maximum permissible upper limit--that can be fed to an animal before a discernible impact is shown. [...] Then you divide that by 100. [...]

And now you've got a safety margin, so you got 1/100 of the largest dose that can be given with no discernible impact."

In other words, classified as toxins, vitamins, minerals and herbs would only be allowed to be marketed in doses that have no discernible impact on anyone. Then why bother taking them?

And that's not all. Where our grocery and health food store shelves are now brimming with supplements, only 18 of them would be on the Codex whitelist. Everything not on the list, such as CoQ10, glucosamine, etc. would be illegal--not as in "prescription-only" illegal, but as in "take it and you go to jail" illegal.

But the mandatory requirements of the Codex will not only concern vitamins and minerals, but all foods. Under Codex rules, nearly all foods must be irradiated. And levels of radiation can be much higher than previously permitted.

While irradiated U.S. foods are currently treated with 1 - 7.5 kiloGray of radiation, the Codex would lift its already high limit of 10kiloGray--the equivalent of ca. 330 million chest X-rays--"when necessary to achieve a legitimate technological purpose," whatever that may be. Granted, the text says, that the dose of radiation "should not compromise consumer safety or wholesomeness of the food." Note, however, that it says "should," not "shall" (an important legal difference, since "should" is not compulsory).

You buy rBST-free milk? Not much longer, because under the Codex all dairy cows will have to be treated with Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone. All animals used for human consumption will have to be fed antibiotics. Organic standards will be relaxed to include such measures. And did we mention that under the Codex, genetically modified (GM) produce will no longer have to be labeled?

Say good-bye to true organic food, and maybe even food that retains any resemblance of nutritional value.

Moreover, in 2001, twelve hazardous, cancer-causing organic chemicals called POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) were unanimously banned by 176 countries, including the United States. Codex Alimentarius will bring back seven of these forbidden substances--such as hexachlorobenzene, dieldrin, and aldrin--to be freely used again. Permitted levels of various chemicals in foods will be upped as well.

What, are they trying to kill us?

Rima Laibow has done the math, she claims, using figures coming directly from the WHO and FAO. And according to those epidemiological projections, she believes that just the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline alone will result in about 3 billion deaths. "1 billion through simple starvation," she says. "But the next 2 billion, they will die from the preventable diseases of under-nutrition."

She calls the new Codex standards "food regulations that are in fact the legalization of mandated toxicity and under-nutrition."

Even if you're thinking of emigrating to Thailand or Guatemala to escape this nutritional holocaust, forget it. Once implemented, the Codex Alimentarius will set food safety standards, rules and regulations for over 160 countries, or 97% of the world's population.

The only way is to fight it before it gets implemented, says Laibow, who is working on just that with a team of lawyers. If you want to help, send an email to your Congressman and/or sign the citizens petition on Laibow's website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org.