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The Detail, Emile Donovan speaks to Mitchell, and to Mark Honeychurch from the Society for Science-based Healthcare, about the lax regulations and enforcement of natural medications in New Zealand. Our rules around medications and supplements is a matter of language. If you re selling a product which claims to have a therapeutic purpose - as in, something that will cure or correct an ailment - it falls under the Medicines Act of 1981, and must meet stringent requirements. In order to sell a pill which you say nullifies headaches, you have to prove it does, in fact, nullify headaches. However, if you re hawking a supplement which you claim is an innovative combination of ingredients which can boost the body s ability to stave off common ailments and reduce the likelihood of headaches, regulation is much thinner on the ground.
Fallen politician Jami-Lee Ross has turned his hand to selling "health" supplements with dubious benefits. It's an industry that's thinly regulated and barely policed.
The vitamin boom: Do supplements really work?
14 minutes to read
By: Donna Chisholm
New Zealanders increasingly turn to supplements for protection against everything from colds to Covid. But do our laws deny us access to products that may actually help us? Donna Chisholm reports. Nowhere are New Zealanders conflicted attitudes to vitamin supplements better illustrated than in the Dunedin home of Dr Lisa Houghton, a professor of nutrition at the University of Otago, and her accountant husband Brett Dailey.
Ask Houghton whether it s a good idea to take multivitamins and she ll tell you the people who need them least are those who take them most; that we get the critical nutrients we need from our food. Apart from taking iron when she was younger, she doesn t use them. Then she laughs and adds, But my husband loves them. Dailey, she says, has given each of their three daughters, now in their teens and early twenties, a multivitamin tablet each day since they w