Alliance for Natural Health

The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) was founded in 2002 by Dr Robert Verkerk and is based in the UK. In 2004, along with two British trade associations, ANH had a legal challenge to the European Union's Food Supplements Directive referred to the European Court of Justice by the High Court in London. Although the European Court of Justice's Advocate General subsequently said that the EU's plan to tighten rules on the sale of vitamins and food supplements should be scrapped, he was eventually overruled by the European Court, which decided that the measures in question were necessary and appropriate for the purpose of protecting public health. ANH, however, interpreted the ban as applying only to synthetically produced supplements - and not to vitamins and minerals normally found in or consumed as part of the diet. Nevertheless, the European judges did acknowledge the Advocate General's concerns, stating that there must be clear procedures to allow substances to be added to the permitted list based on scientific evidence. They also said that any refusal to add a product to the list must be open to challenge in the courts.

The Alliance is generally considered to be one of the more moderate organizations in the health freedom movement, in that it believes negative media publicity about nutrients such as vitamin E are merely a result of misinterpretations over the science. The Alliance also criticises the latest research proposing vitamin C supplementation does not protect against the common cold as having a number of fundamental flaws.