Changing Canada’s health regulatory system
It has been well over 50 years since Canada, along with the US’s Food and Drug Act (FDA), decided that only drugs could diagnose, prevent, treat, mitigate and cure disease. Since then, we have discovered that the body is comprised more of microbes than bone and tissue, and that expensive pharmaceutical agents, as good as they are in many instances, have limited scope in restoring and maintaining our health. Microbe-rich fermented food and natural health products containing microbes such as probiotics are now recognized as also conferring health benefits. Our review raises a number of important issues about how Canada regulates drugs, food, and natural health products. We then propose ways in which policy surrounding health claims on food and probiotics can become more informative and less ambiguous.
Health Canada’s current assessment of self-care products which include natural health products (e.g., probiotics) provides an excellent opportunity for the government to reflect on some of its basic policies. There is no better time to reflect on the ability of food and probiotics to not only be adjuncts to drugs, but in some cases to actually prevent, treat, and even cure some diseases. Rather than force a probiotic yogurt to become a drug under an outdated regulatory system, why not change the system and allow foods, if they have supportive data, to make claims like drugs? Rather than continue to use antibiotics to treat chronic and often fatal diseases, or use drugs like statins with significant side effects to lower cholesterol, why not create a system that allows use of probiotic microbes documented in clinical studies and makes appropriate claims that are informative to consumers? Such systemic changes might allow 35 strains of probiotics to cure Clostridium difficile disease or certain probiotics to lower cholesterol, even by half that of statins, without the side effects.
The current system, while good at protecting the safety of Canadians, too often results in hugely expensive drugs that do not necessarily work better than existing ones, with prices too high to offset company failures and an overly bureaucratic regulatory system. Probiotic therapies could form the basis for a new regulatory system that recognizes the value of foods and microbes in preventing and treating certain diseases.
Read the full paper — A suggestion for evolution of Canada’s health regulatory system by Jessica White and Gregor Reid on the FACETS website.
