- Health Impact News - https://healthimpactnews.com -

Registered Dietitians Being Told that GMOs Are Safe and Gluten Intolerance Is a Fad

ANDReportCover-791x1024 [1]

By Alliance for Natural Health [2]

Meanwhile, there are fresh victories (and challenges) in the battle to stop AND from monopolizing nutrition advice. State Action Alert! [3]

Picture yourself at a continuing education conference for professionals. In the morning, you grab a Hershey’s chocolate milk and head to a panel—sponsored by the Wheat Council—on how gluten intolerance is just a “fad.” After a lunch provided by McDonalds, you listen in on a discussion (hosted by the Big Food front group International Food Information Council [4]) about how GMOs are perfectly safe and environmentally friendly.

Was this a continuing ed conference for Big Food propagandists? Nope—Registered Dieticians! This was Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler’s actual experience [5] at the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association.

Frankly, we’d expect nothing less from the Coca-Cola, Abbott Nutrition, Pepsi, General Mills, and Kellogg’s-funded [6] Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND). After all, corporate contributions are the AND’s largest source of income [5]. In fact, the AND’s mission has become so skewed that its own members have formed an organization—Dieticians for Professional Integrity [7]—to protest its hijacking by corporate interests.

Why are the AND’s doings of concern to the natural health community? Because, as we’ve previously reported [8], the AND uses its financial clout to bar other highly qualified professionals from the field of nutritional therapy, to the lasting detriment of consumer choice.

Turning the tide of AND’s crony capitalist practices is an ongoing effort. Here’s an update on our latest victories and challenges:

Federal Victory: Nutritionists Win Equal Recognition

In February 2013 [9], we warned you about a sneaky insertion by AND lobbyists into draft rules for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Essentially, the added provision would have revised the requirement that hospital diets be prescribed only by the practitioners responsible for the care of the patient—a revision we, in principle, agreed with, since few physicians know anything about nutrition.

The problem was this provision would be expanded to include only Registered Dietitians (RDs)—not Certified Nutrition Specialists, many of whom have higher degrees than dietitians, e.g., Master’s degrees and PhDs, or other highly qualified nutrition professionals.

Thanks to your messages and our official comments to CMS, the final rule [10] has been changed to recognize equally qualified nutrition professionals alongside RDs. This is a real game-changer for non-RD nutrition professionals that we couldn’t have achieved without your support—thank you!

State Concerns: Monopolistic Legislation

For years, the AND’s main state lobbying strategy has been to introduce “scope-of-practice” licensure laws that prevent qualified non-RD nutrition professionals from practicing. These laws are then enforced by state health departments and state dietetics boards dominated by pro-AND dieticians.

For example, Maryland SB 379 [11] sought to expand the state dietetic board’s power by granting it permission to send nutrition professionals cease-and-desist letters (a right usually reserved just for the state Attorney General) and by increasing penalties for non-compliant professionals. Unfortunately, this bill passed in early April, but we won’t give up in Maryland, despite AND’s clout with the legislators there.

Here are the bills we’re currently concerned about:

Take-Action11 [3]

Over the past few years, ANH-USA and our allies have been very successful in defeating monopolistic RD licensure bills. For example, we have won [18] in Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii, Indiana, and West Virginia. As a result, the number of licensure bills introduced on the state level has dropped dramatically. However, we must remain ever vigilant—or else you’ll lose access to nutrition professionals who won’t prescribe McDonalds for lunch.

Global Censorship of Health Information
The Politics of Controlling Therapeutic Information to Protect State-Sponsored Drug Monopolies

[19]

by Attorney Jonathan Emord
Free Shipping available! [19]