Madison Area Lyme Support Group

By Chimnonso Onyekwelu and Rob Verkerk, Ph.D.

America is the research and development capital of natural health. The range of dietary supplements and other natural health products available on the U.S. market dwarfs that in many other global markets, especially the European Union, which has long used regulation as a tool to remove products that compete with drugs.

But anyone with keen eyes on the U.S. market will recognize that the diversity of products on the U.S. market has flatlined in recent years, especially when compared with the boom that followed the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.

Why has innovation declined? Why has natural health not assumed its rightful place as the mainstay of healthcare, as distinct from disease management?

In this article, we investigate the intricate, multi-factorial manner by which special interests work to keep natural health at the margins of healthcare.

America’s health crisis

The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any country in the world by a wide margin. In 2024 alone, spending reached an estimated $5.3 trillion, about 18% of the gross domestic product, averaging over $15,000 per person.

Yet despite this extraordinary investment, the U.S. consistently ranks near the bottom of high-income nations for life expectancy, chronic disease burden and preventable deaths. Put simply, the industrialized country that spends the most on healthcare is also the least healthy.

The scale of ill health makes this contradiction difficult to ignore. Research in 2023 found that 76.4% of American adults live with at least one chronic condition, while 51.4% were managing multiple chronic illnesses.

For many Americans, long-term disease has become normalized rather than exceptional. This raises a fundamental question: what role is the U.S. healthcare system actually playing?

Prescription drugs remain the most important intervention used for people with chronic diseases. While many drugs are lifesaving and essential, prescription medications are now recognized as the third leading cause of death in industrialized countries, behind only heart disease and cancer.

Public criticism has therefore focused heavily on Big Pharma, and much of that concern is justified. However, pharmaceutical dominance alone does not explain why Americans are so sick. Health outcomes are shaped long before a prescription is written.

Research consistently shows that up to 80% of chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers, could be prevented or significantly reduced through natural health approaches such as nutrition, lifestyle change, supplements and other preventive interventions.

If this is the case, why are these approaches not more central to chronic disease prevention and care?

The answer lies not in ignorance, but in an orchestrated plan that has been decades in the making. Health outcomes, it turns out, are shaped by who writes the rules, who controls the market and by whom health information is controlled.

In this era of shadow-banning and aggressive policing of “misinformation,” who decides what qualifies as misinformation? And how can people make informed health choices when information is filtered, language is controlled, and foods or nutrients with preventative or therapeutic value cannot be legally claimed to prevent or treat diseases?

To understand the factors at work, we undertook an exercise in which we pointed four different artificial intelligence (AI) engines (ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity and Google Gemini) at the problem, including reviewing the decades’ worth of articles and other data on our international and U.S. websites.

From all of this, we were able to deduce 123 factors, many being interconnected, and most suggesting a conspiracy between some of the most powerful commercial forces (Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Tech) and some of the most powerful agencies — the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

To help simplify what is an incredibly sophisticated and intricate system of control is, we’ve distilled all of it down to six interconnected macro-drivers that work to constrain natural health in what is widely regarded as the most liberal economy in the world, that of the U.

The ‘big 6’ macro-drivers constraining natural health

1. Who writes the rules?

Beyond genetics, health is largely shaped by how and where we live, how we move, what we ingest and inhale, how we work and recreate and other aspects of our behavior and choices. But choices, especially as they relate to health, are greatly affected by the information we receive from the various channels to which we are exposed.

Whoever writes the rules decides what counts as “food,” a “food ingredient,” or what gets labeled a “drug.” The health information attributed to those foods or ingredients is subject to extreme control by those who write the rules, whether these are statutory and written into law, or non-statutory, such as government guidance or algorithms used by social media platforms.

A blueberry can be packed with antioxidants that can reduce your risk of heart disease,  phytosterols may support heart or hormonal health, chia seeds may support metabolic health and compounds like curcumin or berberine show incredible therapeutic promise.

Yet any claim that suggests these and the thousands of other natural products out there can be used to treat or prevent disease is illegal.

Such claims are the sole domain of drugs — a regulatory architecture that has been crafted over decades by Big Pharma. Consumers may indeed be urged by public health authorities to choose what they eat or consume wisely, yet they are denied a complete picture of what is known scientifically about natural products, especially where these are natural alternatives to drugs.

As we saw during the COVID-19 era, this regulatory power intensifies during public health emergencies. Under emergency authorities, governments can rapidly rewrite rules, suspend existing safeguards and centralize decision-making.

This often leads to the strict policing of information via labels like “misinformation” or “unsafe.” We now know, through recent congressional hearings and updated studies (here and here), that some of the information originally dismissed as “disinformation,” such as the strength of natural immunity, the limited effectiveness of masking and the weak scientific basis for the six-foot distancing, was in fact scientifically sound.

The same pattern is reinforced globally. International standards set by bodies like the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the WHO privilege pharmaceutical-style evidence.

Drugs are presumed “safe and effective” on receipt of their drug license, at least until either is disproven during post-marketing surveillance (e.g., thalidomide, Vioxx).

Foods and natural products, by contrast, must continuously justify any health claims made and disease treatment, mitigation or prevention claims are prohibited. When rules, language, and evidence thresholds are written this way, natural health is constrained, not by science, but by those who write the rules and set the narrative around human healthcare.

2. Who controls the money and markets?

Natural health is constrained at the level of evidence, where money determines what qualifies as “science.” In 1991, about 80% of industry-funded clinical trials were conducted in academic medical centers; by 2004, that figure had fallen to 26%, replaced by for-profit research organisations contracted by drug companies.

This shift has untold impact: study designs, publications, regulations and medical education reflect pharmaceutical interests, leaving natural therapies — without comparable capital — unable to produce the forms of evidence regulators, insurers and clinicians are structurally conditioned to demand.

Markets then reinforce this imbalance. Just four retailers control around 65% of grocery sales, while seeds, meat and grain trading are 60-90% concentrated. Online, gatekeepers such as Amazon and Walmart determine visibility, pricing pressure and data access.

Natural brands must pay for shelf space, surrender customer data and risk rapid imitation, while pharmaceutical and ultraprocessed products benefit from scale, marketing budgets and preferential placement across supply chains and pharmacies.

Finally, the squeeze extends into innovation and medical culture. Following the Myriad case, naturally occurring substances are largely excluded from patent protection, leaving high research costs with little legal protection. Without intellectual property protection, investors see little upside, research dries up and innovation slows.

Combined with regulatory capture and heavy pharmaceutical lobbying, control of money and markets systematically prioritises pharmaceutical over natural health and substances long before consumers are offered a real choice.

3. Who decides ‘standard care’?

Natural health is further squeezed by who defines “standard care.” Evidence-based medicine has elevated randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to a near-exclusive gold standard, despite clear limits.

One analysis found 36% of highly cited RCTs were later contradicted or shown to have weaker effects, while RCTs routinely exclude older, multi-morbid and real-world patients.

Because industry funds most large trials, the hierarchy is skewed: 69% of industry studies focus on drugs, while a mere 1.5% examine behavioral changes. When RCTs are treated as the only valid evidence, therapies without patent-driven funding struggle to generate the evidence required to be recognised as “standard care.”

Funding and publication bias reinforce this hierarchy. Industry-sponsored studies are about 27% more likely to favour the sponsor’s product, and roughly 69% of industry-funded comparative effectiveness studies focus on drugs, while negative results are routinely suppressed.

For instance, in antidepressant research, roughly 92% of trials with negative or questionable outcomes were never published or were misrepresented, while positive trials were almost always published.

Nutrition research remains sidelined, stagnating at about 5% of total National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for over two decades, while U.S. cancer nutrition funding fell 44% between 2012 and 2018. What is underfunded is under-studied, and what is under-studied rarely becomes “standard.”

Professional policing then locks these standards in place. In 2024 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent $294 million on lobbying, while industry funding now covers about 70% of doctor training. Guidelines built on this evidence base are enforced through reimbursement rules and medical boards that determine acceptable practice.

During the pandemic, clinicians prioritising nutrition, prevention or off-guideline approaches were suspended or barred from practice, signalling that deviation carries real risk.

By controlling the evidence, the education and the licenses, the system ensures that “standard care” remains drug-centred while systematically marginalizing natural health.

4. Who controls what you’re allowed to hear?

Natural health is constrained not only by evidence rules, but by visibility itself. As the saying goes, “he who pays the piper dictates the tune.”

Legacy media is structurally dependent on pharmaceutical advertising: between January and October 2024, pharma brands spent $7.9 billion on ads, with over $5.3 billion going to national and local TV, accounting for roughly 10%-12% of all TV ad revenue.

Prescription drug ads alone drove 11.6% of national linear TV spend. This dependence creates incentives to avoid narratives that challenge drug-centred models while marginalizing alternatives that do not buy airtime.

Beyond commercials, the flow of information is constrained through biased “fact-checking” and algorithmic suppression. Platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter use downranking, demonetization, shadow banning and deplatforming to suppress health content that diverges from “authoritative sources.”

In 2022, Facebook censored a peer-reviewed investigation by The British Medical Journal (BMJ) into Pfizer’s vaccine trials, labeling it “missing context” despite the fact-checker identifying no factual errors.

Natural health brands also face advertising suspensions for “health claims” or using words like “treat” or “prevent,” even when discussing evidence-based substances.

Pharma also shapes discourse via Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). For example, a 2024 study investigating the 200% increase in opioid-related deaths (2000-2014) found that companies like Purdue Pharma and Janssen drove widespread opioid prescribing through KOL networks.

Today, this manufactured consensus extends to digital platforms where “patient influencers” are paid to promote medications. By framing natural health as “unproven” and using coordinated reporting campaigns to stigmatize non-drug interventions, the system ensures that what the public hears is not the full scientific truth, but a carefully curated pharmaceutical narrative.

5. How risk and law are weaponized

Legal and liability pressures have become another mechanism through which natural health is squeezed. Regulators increasingly rely on a “risk-based” enforcement framework that magnifies isolated incidents to justify broader restrictions on entire categories of natural products.

A clear example in the U.S. relates to the FDA’s 2019 withdrawal of Compliance Policy Guide (CPG) 400.400, which, for more than three decades, allowed homeopathic products to be marketed under enforcement discretion without necessitating a full drug license if they met labeling and manufacturing standards set by the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS).

Removing that policy effectively exposed traditional remedies to the same “new drug” approval standards applied to pharmaceuticals — an impossible threshold for non-patentable substances that cannot recover the roughly $2.6 billion cost of modern drug development.

The disparity is striking: conventional pharmaceuticals account for more than 99% of adverse drug events reported to the FDA, while homeopathic products represent only a minute fraction of one percent. That’s why we’re engaged in a lawsuit to correct this wrong that is, otherwise, likely to eliminate an entire modality of alternative medicine.

Regulatory scrutiny is further reinforced through a steady stream of investigations into products marketed as natural. State attorney general actions frequently target categories such as foods and dietary supplements, weight-loss and wellness products sold online and CBD or cannabis-derived supplements.

Of course, oversight of adulterated or misbranded products is a legitimate consumer-protection function. However, enforcement often concentrates disproportionately on natural health categories, with highly publicized investigations and warning campaigns that shape public perception even when issues stem from isolated violations.

The result is selective pressure: the entire sector faces reputational damage, regulatory uncertainty and the high cost of compliance or litigation.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical drugs, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, are responsible for nearly 2 million emergency department visits annually in the U.S. Despite this significant safety burden, pharmaceuticals continue to be framed as the default “safe” option.

The resulting asymmetry is clear: natural health products face heightened scrutiny and legal exposure, while pharmaceutical interventions retain institutional credibility and market dominance.

6. How our minds are manipulated

Natural health is also squeezed at the level of mindset, through cultural conditioning that reshapes what people consider “normal” health. When the average American develops a headache, the instinct is often to reach for paracetamol (acetaminophen or Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Advil).

Rarely is the first question: Am I dehydrated? Did I sleep poorly? Is stress, posture, or diet contributing to my problem? This reflex reflects a shift from addressing causes to suppressing symptoms.

Over time, it narrows the solutions people consider, pushing nutrition, lifestyle change and other preventive approaches to the margins before they are explored.

The same conditioning shapes how society views chronic illness. More than 75% of U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition, and over half have two or more. Diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer account for eight of the 10 leading causes of death, while treatment consumes over 90% of the nation’s $4.9 trillion annual healthcare spending.

As these conditions become widespread, medication use becomes routine: about one-third of Americans in their 60s and 70s take five or more prescription drugs regularly, a pattern known as polypharmacy. What might once have signaled systemic health failure is increasingly treated as simply part of modern life.

At the same time, key drivers of poor health are normalized. Ultraprocessed foods now make up about 60% of daily calories in the U.S., while studies show nutrient levels in some vegetables have declined since the mid-20th century.

The result is a population that is often overfed yet micronutrient-deficient. Rather than addressing these underlying causes, the dominant response remains pharmaceutical management. The cycle reinforces itself: unhealthy environments produce chronic illness, illness fuels drug dependence, while natural health is pushed to the background.

The future

The future of natural health in the U.S. — as well as in other parts of the world with elaborate, Big Pharma and Big Food-controlled regulatory systems — will not be decided by science alone.

Ultimately, it will depend on how these six macro-drivers are confronted together. Pharmaceuticals still remain far and away the most substantial influence on health, and Big Pharma still holds a dominant market share of the types of vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids and botanicals available through major multiples and pharmacies.

Big Pharma and Big Food’s tentacles reach deep into almost every area that controls which products, services and health information the majority of the population has access to.

They have a disproportionate influence on political systems, regulation, markets, medical standards, information control, legal pressure and cultural conditioning.

All six of these macro-drivers must be tackled simultaneously if we’re to restore balance, allowing nature to be reinstated as the most important influence on our health, an interaction that is the product of our co-evolution with natural systems over millennia.

This matters because the current health trajectory is unsustainable, and millions are destined to suffer and receive substandard support for their health.

With aging populations and spiralling rates of chronic disease that now affect the majority of adults, together with ever-growing costs of healthcare that fail to address the underlying causes of disease, prevention can no longer remain peripheral.

Nutrition, herbal medicine, lifestyle medicine and a gamut of natural interventions offer pathways that support the body’s inherent capacity for health.

The goal is not to replace modern medicine but to remove the prejudices against natural medicine and offer choice.

A future where natural health is protected, researched and accessible would not only expand choice, it would help move healthcare from a system built around managing disease through largely synthetic, chemical interventions, to one capable of sustaining human health because natural systems tend to work in concert with our bodies and minds, not against them.

ANH action plan in the U.S.

Since leading U.S. constitutional attorney Jonathan Emord (who has been gifted the moniker the “FDA Dragon Slayer,” given he holds the record for lawsuit wins against the FDA) joined ANH-USA as general counsel in mid-2024, we have embarked on a radical plan involving over 30 distinct legal and regulatory initiatives to combat the problems we describe in this article.

We are unfolding this plan by way of an array of lawsuits, other legal initiatives, campaigns, and political Action Alerts about which you can find out more in articles accessible on our website, anh-usa.org.

You can sign up for our free weekly U.S. newsletter and be kept abreast of our implementation of this unique plan, which centres on bringing in natural health from the margins and embracing it at the heart of human healthcare.

Please circulate this article widely among your networks to help address the censorship that affects the communication of our work.

Originally published by Alliance for Natural Health International.

Chimnonso Onyekwelu serves as a legal researcher at Alliance for Natural Health International, where she does high-level policy analysis and interpretation of legal frameworks in the health and nutrition sector. 

Rob Verkerk, Ph.D., is the founder and executive & scientific director of Alliance for Natural Health International.