European legal ruling could kill off health claim proposals
Craig Simpson of law firm Steptoe & Johnson said criticisms levelled at the proposed Food Supplements Directive in April by the advocate general Leendert Geelhoed (the senior adviser to the ECJ) were equally applicable to the health claims regulation.
If the court agrees with Geelhoed that the Supplements Directive is illegal, the same could apply to the health claims regulation, which includes a similar prior approvals process for health claims, Simpson suggested to the audience of an Agra Informa conference on functional drinks.
"Geelhoed's argument was that the prior approvals process impeded business development and was not able to provide companies with sufficient legal certainty because they didn't know whether their products, which may have been on the market for years, would now be approved or not. You could make the same arguments about health claims."
The Council of Ministers last month rejected calls to axe the prior approvals procedure and nutrient profiling [which would ban positive claims about ingredients if the overall nutrient profile of the product was deemed unhealthy].
However, it agreed to allow non-specific claims and references to general wellbeing, psychological or behavioural functions, slimming and weight control, provided they are accompanied by an authorised health claim. This would also include hunger management claims for low-GI products.
The latest version was still very unpopular with the industry, but contained significant concessions, said Leatherhead Food International's regulatory advisor Christos Zacharis: "It's looking considerably better than it did a few months ago."
However, David Hare, a health and diet sector lobbyist at the Whitehouse Consultancy, said: "It's hard to see a compromise on nutrient profiling. [The European] Parliament wants to scrap it completely and the council insists on keeping it."
