Every day, Healthspan receives the latest research reports from around the world relating to advances in nutrition, so for many years we have been aware of the tremendous health benefits of taking Selenium

It therefore came as rather a surprise recently to find an article as important as the one below in the Daily Mail buried virtually out of sight in the centre of the paper. You might wonder why the reporting of research into a natural food that can reduce the risks of several forms of cancer by up to 76% doesn’t dominate the headlines on the front page of every newspaper in the land.
The answer is disturbingly simple. Had selenium been developed as a ‘drug discovery’ by scientists in a leading pharmaceutical company, then its international PR machines would have gone into overdrive, with press conferences announcing a major cancer-protection drug. It would then indeed have been front-page news. But selenium is a natural substance that cannot be patented and sold for vast profits, so no one is going to make a fuss about it - except of course for leading doctors and nutritionists!

So what exactly is selenium?
It is a trace element found in the soil. The best sources are Brazil nuts, yeast and whole grains. It normally enters our food chain through plants, such as wheat. However, evidence shows that the United Kingdom intake of selenium is falling and is now considerably lower than the government’s reference level. This has happened because we used to buy much of our wheat from Canada, which has selenium rich soil, whereas in Europe ours has only low levels. The news article below points out that if we eat half a dozen Brazil nuts a day, we get the right amounts of selenium - but that’s over 2,000 nuts a year. Perhaps this is a prime example of why we believe that for most of us an optimum diet without supplements is difficult to achieve.

Why doesn’t Healthspan give us facts like these?
We would like to, but regrettably existing laws don’t allow supplement suppliers to give you the same information as newspapers. The reason is simply this - it’s a ‘Catch 22’. Nutritional supplements are classified in law as ‘foods’, not medicines, and as such are governed by food legislation. If we make a medicinal claim, the product needs a medicinal licence that would cost a fortune to obtain and cannot be recovered by patent costs. Let me give you an example. If a nutritional supplement supplier tells you that fish oil or glucosamine will prevent or protect against a disease, then that is a medicinal claim and becomes subject to medicines regulations.
These then fall under the jurisdiction of the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products’ Regulatory Agency). If a pharmaceutical company were to spend millions on obtaining a ‘medicines’ licence for a food supplement, then it would be able to recoup its costs by charging the NHS to supply it to patients. Clearly this benefits neither the consumer nor the overburdened NHS. It’s also why supplement manufacturers are forced to use phrases such as ‘may help maintain a healthy heart’ to tell you what their products do. It’s really a euphemism for ‘sorry, we’re not allowed to say that it will reduce the risk of heart disease, because that would turn it into a medicine and not a health food and would therefore be illegal’.
At Healthspan, we aim to ensure that your nutrition is of such a high quality that you reduce the risks of becoming ill and will live longer and healthier lives without the need to take as many conventional ‘medicines’.
Those medicines you get from your doctor are generally prescribed to treat the disease after you’ve got it, which many in the nutritional camp believe is ‘after the horse has bolted’.

As a food supplement, Healthspan sells a year’s supply (360 tablets) of bio-available organic selenium 200mcg for just £9.45. That’s exactly the amount that Dr Rayman, writing in the Daily Mail, says we need. In my opinion you would be ‘nuts’ not to take one tablet every day at that price, I certainly do.

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