For millions of years, humans and animals have maintained their health by eating the fruits of the earth. The necessity and benefits of a broad natural diet are evident from Egyptian skeletal remains from 6000 years ago which suggest scurvy – a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. In 1753 a Scottish surgeon James Lind demonstrated that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit. The New Zealand government seems intent on changing history.
You might be interested in the kind of nation we will end up inhabiting:
Reverse patenting
If a Natural Health Product is found to benefit a serious illness (such as lemons which benefit scurvy), according to the Bill it should be classed as a medicine. Consequently, according to the letter of the new law, only doctors will be allowed to prescribe lemons. Joking apart, most foods benefit serious illness. You might think there is no need to pass a law classifying them as medicines, but according to the Government, you would be wrong.
80% of drugs are in fact derived from the properties of plants. For years pharmaceutical companies have been trying to patent medicinal plants and secure a monopoly of their supply and use. But this effort largely failed in the patent courts. The remedy for pharmaceutical companies is contained in the Bill being introduced by our Labour government. If a plant is used to make a medicine or the molecular structure of any of its compounds is mimicked by a medicine, then the use of the actual plant should be restricted.
For this reason, in 2016 a bevy of well-paid Ministry of Health experts (???) produced an idiotic list of common plants that they envisioned should be restricted. Natural products in this list included cinnamon, eggplant, almond, mustard, tea – yes you did read that correctly – coconut, and many many others. The present Bill – the third attempt over the years to get this past Parliament – sets up the same conditions that prompted the 2016 list of restricted plants. A sort of frenzied desire to control the minutia of individual life driven by a mad instinct that the government always knows best.