Course:FNH200/Lessons/Lesson 04/Page 04.6

04.6 Natural Health Products

To deal with the uniqueness of emerging products which are neither strictly foods nor drugs, the government has established a Natural Health Products Directorate, responsible for regulations and labelling guidelines for these products. We will learn about this topic in Lesson 13.

How about the international scene?

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1963 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to develop international food standards to protect consumer health and to facilitate fair trading practices in foods. Today, there are more than 189 member countries including Canada. Canada's participation in Codex is coordinated through the Office of the Codex Contact Point for Canada, located in the Food Directorate, Health Products and Food Branch of Health Canada.

If you are interested in the regulations in the United States, you may wish to check out the website of the US Food and Drug Administration, Centre for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition: https://www.fda.gov/

The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada website for information concerning US FDA regulations is also useful especially for import-export cases: http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/home/?id=1395690825741