Ban the Broccoli!

Fantastic headline in the Daily Express on Saturday (September 5, 2009):

BROCCOLI BEATS HEART DISEASE

Call me an idiot...but I'd call that a medical claim. Being a herbalist, I'd be rather paranoid and extremly woried about making claims like that. Not that it is not true of course, but because herbal medicine and our right to talk about it is being demolished by Europe and the MHRA (the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority). Currently, all herbs, vegetables, fruits, seeds, and all other vegetable materials sold as medicines (or to put it another way - because they are good for us) have to undergo a rigorous registration process under the perversly named "Traditional European Herbal Medicine Scheme". As I have described in previous blogs this process is a highly expensive, time consuming and totally unnecessary process that has to be carried out on every herb, vegetable, fruit, seed etc that is being sold for its medicinal properties.We are told it is to protect public safety. I'm still waiting to see the mortality figures...

If I dried broccoli and put it into capsules therefore, I would have to subject it to the registration process. It's the same broccoli I had for dinner and is freely on sale at the grocery. So what happened to it just by putting it into a capsule, or a tablet, or a liquid extract? What's the difference? I did not suddenly make it a medicine....it already was. Read the Daily Express if you don't believe me. They go into intricate chemical and physiological detail about how vegetables in this family of plants exert their medicinal effects on the body, in this case the heart and circulation. Vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, beetroot etc are not medicinal because I say so, or because the MHRA says so, or because of the way they are processed...they just are...straight out of the ground, steamed, with a little butter or pressed into a tablet. What is the difference? The broccoli does not somehow mystically alter or take on a new area of activity just because a herbalist gets hold of it! Maybe the MHRA really does believe in magic and that plants are somehow transformed in the hands of those weird herbalists?

The difference of course is that the herbal industry represents a taxable resource for Europe/MHRA. So the question "when is broccoli not broccoli" is answered by saying, "when a herbalist gets his hands on it". However, this approach is rather worrying of course because when the few herbal companies that will be left after registration have registered all that they could afford then maybe the MHRA will have to go after fruit and veg merchants to maintain their funding! Tax the pharmaceuticals at source. For goodness sake there is sulforaphane in broccoli and its vegetable relatives. If sulforaphane does not sound like a pharmaceutical what does hey? So why stop at taxing the herbal industry...this stuff is in there full stop, go to the source, tax the farmer, the grocer, God!

What a joke it will be when we are handed a "patient information leaflet" or safety data sheet by the greengrocer when picking up our greens. Oh, how frustrated will they be at having to compile these documents for the MHRA, and pay for the pleasure of compiling them?

Maybe, this is what GM food is all about. The MHRA and European bods do not want us being subjected to so many medicinal chemicals in our food. Breed all those medicinal chemicals out. While you are at it limit the amount of vitamins in food too. Don't want too many of them. Blimey, think of how healthy we'd be if we left all those things in there, and the thought of people actually using every day food stuffs as medicine really should be outlawed. Was it not Hippocrates, "The Father of Medicine" who said, "Let food be your medicine, let medicine be your food"? Well, yes, but he was an ancient idiot of course who knew nothing about chemistry and how dangerous food could actually become in the hands of the health conscious consumer. He obviously did not notice how these foods mysteriously transformed into registered medicines just because of they way they were used. He of course just saw the herb, the fruit, the seed, the vegetable etc for what it was. He was not looking at plant life through the tax tinted MHRA issue shades. So, go GM now...avoid having to flood your body with those medicinal chemicals and registered medicinals, and be very scared because according to the MHRA and Europe certain plants can alter their state and become new and hideous pharmaceuticals just because of they way they are presented for sale!