Alert: Protect Your Right To Natural and Bio-available Vitamin B-6!
April 6, 2010
Human beings cannot live without vitamin B-6. It is also important for the prevention of cancer and the prevention and treatment of seizures, anemia, mental disorders including schizophrenia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other conditions. Its effect on carpal tunnel can seem almost miraculous.
A natural form of the vitamin, Pyridoxamine, was recently yanked off the market by the FDA. Why? Because a pharmaceutical company, BioStratum, wanted sole use of pyridoxamine in a drug, a drug which may or may not ever appear. The company filed a so-called citizens petition and the FDA agreed, notwithstanding protests from ANH-USA, other organizations, and thousands of citizens. You might ask: how can Pharma take a supplement off the market and claim exclusive use of it as a prescription drug? The FDA does not presently feel obligated to answer this question.
Unfortunately, this isn’t all the bad news about vitamin B6. All forms of B-6, natural or synthetic, must be converted to P5P, another natural form, for the body to use it. Another drug company, Medicure Pharma, wants sole use of P5P and so has petitioned the FDA to ban its use as a supplement as well.
Medicure has yet to market a drug made from P5P, but wants the ban to take place now. And never mind that any individual unable to convert synthetic B6 to P5P would have to rely solely on Medicure’s product to stay alive.
How does Medicure think it can get away with this? Its petition states rather candidly: “Pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs must be protected from companies that may seek to market the ingredients in those drugs as dietary supplements. The marketing of such products has the potential to undermine the incentive for the development of new drugs because many people may choose to purchase the supplements rather than the drugs.”
This is not of course a case of supplement producers creating a product to compete with an existing prescription drug. It is just the reverse. P5P, the natural and bioactive form of B6, has existed in food for as long as there have been humans and has been available as a supplement for years. Medicure seems to be saying: If it seems profitable, let’s just turn a critical vitamin, one essential for human life, into a drug, make it available only by prescription, and mark up the price. This is truly outrageous.
The FDA has not yet responded to Medicure’s petition. We have asked you in the past to send a message to the FDA and Congress protesting Medicure’s P5P grab, and the time has come to send some more messages. So if you haven’t sent in a message to the FDA and Congress yet, or even if you have, please send one today.
While we are discussing Vitamin B6, here is the latest scientific report. An analysis of 13 U.S., European and Asian studies of vitamin B6 and colon cancer, conducted from 2002-2009, has been published in a special edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Studies of the range of B6 doses found that vitamin B6 taken in higher doses reduced the risk of colon cancer by 21 percent. In one study, Dr. Susanna Larsson and her colleagues at Sweden’s National Institute of Environmental Medicine reported an inverse relationship between the intake of vitamin B6 or pyridoxine and the risk of colon cancer. Dr. Larsson linked the effect to bloodstream levels of pyridoxal-phosphate (PLP), the main active coenzyme form of vitamin B6. Pyridoxal-phosphate is also known as pyridoxal 5-phosphate or (as we referred to it above) P5P.
Don’t let the FDA take away our access to the natural and most bioavailable form of B6, P5P. Please take action now.
please do not allow the Drug companies the right to take B6 and P5P off the market because they want to incorporate it into a drug.. Is the FDA here to help the American consumer of vitamins or to protect the Drug companes
Stop trying to kill us all in the name of greed. Maybe it is time to go to arms and defend
our right to life!
FDA please don’t allow the pharmaceutical companies to take over the vitamin B-6.
“A natural form of the vitamin, Pyridoxamine, was recently yanked off the market by the FDA. Why? Because a pharmaceutical company, BioStratum, wanted sole use of pyridoxamine in a drug, a drug which may or may not ever appear. The company filed a so-called citizens petition and the FDA agreed, notwithstanding protests from ANH-USA, other organizations, and thousands of citizens.”
This is just one of years and years of greedy and monstrous actions of the FDA and the industries who don’t care at all that they are hurting or killing children or adults or pets. I am disabled by toxic chemical poisoning and know what it is like to live a nightmare where you no longer have your health and cannot afford to go to the alternative doctotrs who are angels as far as I am concerned….for heaven’s sake, is there anyone out there in the government or industrial world who cares for their
fellow human being and the animals, please hear me! Stop robbing us of our good health we are born with, stop blocking the way for us to get back that health, start having a conscience and start caring about what happens to childeren, adults and animals. YOU CANNOT TAKE ALL THAT MONEY WITH YOU WHEN YOU DIE AND LEAVE THIS EARTH1 i AM ONE OF THE BILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO NEED DESPARATELY NEED THE VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS THAT ARE3 STILL AVAILOABLE TO US, PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME OR ANYONE ELSE. Thank you. karen rose
The FDA is playing god and choosing the BIG PHARMA companies as it’s beneficiaries. No substance should be banned that is essential to human life. It is the right of all humanity to have acess to any element that is needed by the body. This action by the FDA and BIG PHARMA is akin to Naziism. Congress needs to change the paradigm of the FDA. This agency needs to protect consumers first.
Isn’t B6 a catalyst for Tryptophan?
Since Tryptophan was reduced in the food supply and the supplement removed under very suspicious, strange and unusual circumstance (1989 Republican H W Bush Presidency) in the same time frame as Prozac began it’s entrance into the market place (along with all those ” made to order” mental illnesses): It is obvious that Republican Administration has political overtones when you consider the distribution point for Prozac was the Mental Health Industry that received funding under the Reagan / Bush presidency several years before. While the public outcry changed the course and allowed Tryptophan back as a herbal product it was never restore in the food supply.
Now we see the catalyst for Tryptophan (an essential amino acid for personality stability and other important health issues) being taken away from the public again by this underhanded, dirty deal, of removing the importance of Vitamin B6 for use of the deadly mind drugs.
There is not enough soap and water to cleanse the hands of the FDA and their bed partner the Pharmacutical industry.
The FDA Ban of L-Tryptophan:
Politics, Profits and Prozac & other psychotropic drugs
by Dean Wolfe Manders, Ph.D.
http://www.ceri.com/trypto.htm
please don’t make b6 a pharm exclusive. its natural and should not be a script.
This action is typical of pharmaceuticals, who are interested in their own profit without regard to public health. Its time these money machines are reined in. People are better off using natural remedies anyway.
It is exhausting trying to keep up with all the attacks on natural substances. The antics of the FDA, Monsanto, etc. must be stopped permanently. Is there any way we can get legislation passed that will forever protect our rights to natural medicine? We spend so much time and energy trying to protect our rights, we lose valuable, creative time. Something that is ironclad must be passed.
Thank you.
No drug company has the right to make claims on vitamins. This is insane. It’s time to get rid of the FDA if they can’t do their jobs right.
BIg Pharma and governmental agencies that foster them (FDA) and the standard american diet is just that SAD!!!! One could almost believe there is an evil plot afoot to kill us all!!!! The lack of nutrition in our foods are causing record birth defects and disabilities, obesity and death…and then when you do develop health problems your dr spends 5 minutes with you and gives you prescriptions that treat symptoms NOT eliminating causes!!!! Often these expensive drugs have worse side effects than what they treat!!! and your condition progressively worsens causing yet the need (not!) for more expensive drugs that treat symptoms with horrendous side effects!!! The high fructose corn syrup,bromides and other additives in our foods (government approved) create ill health and cause us to eat even more of this poison…and if you research and find the nutrients that heal you…. and you depend on them to restore and keep your health why Big Brother Govt.comes and takes them away….doesn’t that sound like they want you to die?
It does to me….HEALTH CARE AND THE FDA IN AMERICA IS THIS CENTURY’S BIGGEST FARCE AND HOAX EVER PERPETRATED ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!!!!
STOP IT TODAY!!!!!
There are certainly a lot of great points and comments, including especially the one about losing out on creative time! I also think Tina’s comment is dead on and her outrage is justified.
What I wrote to the FDA:
It completely disgusts me that the FDA plasters labels all over proven natural remedies and cures from small caring organizations and companies to scare and deter the general public about healthy living and alternative medicine thats been around and proven for hundreds and thousands of years, just so they can turn around to help huge and irresponsible pharmaceutical companies try to monopolize those same ingredients and remedies, jacking up costs, altering the ingredients from original form, and contaminating them from performing in pure form by combining them with other extremely hazardous unregulated and un-tested chemicals. The drug companies have literally gotten away with murder over the years by passing things onto the market that are not safe or tested properly, while the worst you here about with natural cures is someone misusing and getting sick off of them, very rarely leading to any deaths, which is all mostly traceable to the fault of a small mis-informed company, mis-informed individual or freak chance allergic reaction, while these drug companies never take responsibility for the deaths of thousands of people, that collectively add up to staggering numbers, as a result of money hungry management who are too greedy cheap and grimy to properly test products fed to millions. And now yet another company wants to pass this “citizens” petition? No way!
You can also rest assured that I’m not the only one of my politically active, community loving, concerned citizens in my friends circle you will be getting contacted by about this! If you want people to keep trusting your decisions and words on products, you better shape up and clean up the act because it is becoming increasingly obvious to many people that you are in bed and paid off by these companies, and anyone who can be paid off is not trust worthy of reviewing anything for anyone. Ensure the trust of the public and the jobs of the people at your organization who might still actually care about their fellow citizens by not allowing this company to monopolize the 2nd form of B6, and answer any remaining questions about the original form of B6 that has already been taken off the market with full detail as to why. We are the majority and you work for us, not these companies, we have a right to this information or you may find this organization Boycotted.
Contrary to popular belief you can’t brainwash everyone with your smut into making stupid unhealthy decisions, and the people who realize what an injustice is happening will fight it to the end, and completely smear whatever good name you have left in the process, if any! This is not some empty threat, it is the people taking the power back, plain and simple. I’ve had it with all the poor decisions you’re making that effect our health and freedom, and so have many, many other people.
So I re-iterate, do yourselves and everyone else a favor, and do not give the green light on this request to Monopolize and Ban Pyridoxal 5′-Phosphate!
My life depends on high doses of P’5P. I have a genetic disorder called Pyroluria. It occurs primarily in people of English descent and often in families where there is also Porphyria. My sister has been ill all her life with Porphyria and my parents are tested carriers. Pyroluria, like Porphyria, is an error in the genetic instructions that govern the manufacture of heme, the red blood cell responsible for oxygen transport among multiple other crucial functions. Pyroluria results in an over abundance of byproducts of heme manufacture and these strip the nutrients zinc and B6 from the body. Since you can’t run a metabolism or a nervous system without these nutrients, or make hormones without zinc, the result is myriad hellish and debilitating symptoms, among them paresthesia (wierd, random buzzy,electrical sensations), deep irremediable exhaustion, fungal overgrowth all over including oral thrush & loss of nails, inability to sleep, poor glucose transport, perpetual adrenal exhaustion, GI disruption, tremor, radical anxiety with serial panic attacks not emotionally caused, heavy metal toxicity unrelieved by usual detox methods, mood disorder and even mental illness. In short it severely compromises quality of life and it was a daily fight for me for years to simply live a life. I actually managed a household, a marriage and children, and a high profile career with pyroluria, only by pushing relentlessly (which only increases the adrenal exhaustion), and working with myself not to succumb to utter wretchedness. A year ago I finally was diagnosed and within 72 hours of beginning the regimen of 5000 times the RDA of B6 and 7 times the RDA of zinc, the anxiety and paresthesia stopped cold. I remember exactly the moment they ceased. Then other symptoms began to clear and with the help of an intense nutrient based metabolic rebuilding program I have regained and continue to regain well-being I haven’t had since childhood, before the effects of the disorder began to accumulate. It’s not hard to imagine how I feel about drug companies co-opting forms of B6. My life depends on the FDA’s integrity in the matter of P5P availability to consumers. I’ve written, petitioned, made phone calls and stock piled, but ultimately should the FDA bow to big pharma and make B6 unavailable to me and the others with this disorder, I will either have to leave the country or become an invalid.