In May 2025 the New Zealand budget will be released.
I’ve asked the question, what is the Hon Minister Shane Reti doing to address a gaping hole in health funding, the absence of funding for nutrition-related policy?
Increasingly, conventional medical clinicians and general practitioners operate with one arm behind their back, to all appearances oblivious to the body of expanding scientific knowledge persistently shedding light on the role of nutrition in preventing, treating and reversing common conditions.
Why is it so difficult for clinicians and practitioners to comfortably address the role of nutrition in preventing and treating human ailments?
It is evident that there is a prevailing hypocrisy – one that can only naturally erode public trust – at the heart of New Zealand’s health system. It involves a crazy bifurcation towards the medical, where only medicine can be prescribed at the latest known dose, not vitamins and minerals (micronutrients). This is modern public health.
Markedly, drugs are not essential nutrients. Yet it seems there is no department in the Ministry of Health with an obligation to elevate the role of essential micronutrients to a level of importance in human health functioning to where these dietary nutrients are equal to, or more important than, chemically and biologically synthesised drugs.
Somehow the Ministry of Health appears to believe that increasing equity of availability to drug treatment is sufficient for the prevention and maintenance of health.
Access to nutritional supplements is not prioritised for the prevention and maintenance of health while access to drugs is prioritised. This approach is a pervasively corrupted approach. It perpetuates a path-dependent institutional myth, medical valorisation, that most appallingly, straightjackets our poorest and most nutrient-deprived groups into medical dependency and polypharmacy.
Yes, vitamins and minerals which include B group vitamins, vitamin D are prescribed, but for far narrower reasons than the literature might suggest that they could be prescribed for.
While higher income people have the capacity to address this shortfall and actively research and fund their own treatments to address the consequences of inadequate diets, poorer groups do not.
As New Zealand’s Minister of Health is a trained medical doctor, Shane Reti should be aware that many chronic physical and neurological conditions will present alongside chronic nutritional deficiencies. Deficiencies will of course, be exacerbated in low-income populations which include Māori and Pasifika.
Sequential ministers of health have led the charge of the ghetto-isation of these groups into intergenerational medical dependency, dietary poverty, chronic disease, and the fatigue and poor health that prevents people from actively participating in education, training, job seeking and full-time work.
Health ministers have led the charge because they have passively failed to act, failed to set the information systems in process that would climb New Zealand out of the polypharmacy sickness spiral.
Passive health ministers inevitably grow welfare dependency while limiting economic growth, because people remain effectively, disabled, as their conditions accrue over time because the multifactorial drivers of their health problems do not get resolved.
It is very obvious that Māori and Pasifika can lead healthy lives that do not include intergenerational drug dependency and medicalisation from infancy onwards.
It is broadly obvious that people with neurological diseases and disorders commonly present with other common conditions. That across physical and mental illness, poor and insufficient diets underpin our common diseases and syndromes producing less resilient bodies and minds, to cope with the mundane, devastating and/or existential stressors of modern life.
It is well described in the literature that physiological processes require multiple micronutrients as cofactors. Health and homeostasis very simply, cannot be sustained without adequate levels of micronutrients.
It’s broadly recognised outside of governmental regulatory confines, that standard clinical trials are patently unfit for assessment of the benefits of common nutrients (including secondary compounds) because of the way micronutrients interact across these biological processes.
Yet health departments seem uninterested in deepening theirs and public knowledge of these relationships.
The Western world witnessed, during COVID-19, the discarding of established nutritional and therapeutic treatments for treatment of respiratory viruses using the lack-of-controlled trial excuse. Following an increase in chronic conditions post-COVID, doctors are finding that patients are frustrated by the constrained medical toolkit and mystified by their doctors’ relative ignorance concerning the extent to which nutritional therapies can be applied alongside existing drug treatments.
They’re tired of ‘conventional’ practitioner timidity around appropriate dose levels to address deficiencies, as the authorities have long failed to take any interest in how higher doses of some micronutrients with a long history of safe use might be necessary.
Practitioners are naturally, anxious that they will be reported. Pre-COVID, reporting tended to be for far more serious abuses. Doctors who stepped out of line during COVID-19 in 2024 continued to suffer the ramifications of speaking up about vaccine risk and the benefits of off-patent antivirals and nutrients, including tribunal and ‘education’ retraining sessions. They continue to pay the professional and personal costs that accrue when they are reported, no matter the literature and evidence in the peer reviewed literature.
Meanwhile, the increasing weight of evidence in the scientific literature on dietary nutrient supplements as therapeutic treatments for common chronic (including neurological) conditions and in regulating the antiviral immune response is largely ignored. The facts around treating deficiency with larger doses than the recommended levels, which were established based on healthy blood levels from 30 years ago, continue to stagnate.
As such clinician/practitioner treatments are far less sophisticated. Clinicians and practitioners are left unable to address the fact that many of these conditions they treat involve drivers which involve elevated inflammatory markers which are upregulated by poor and insufficient nutrition. Medicine is all too often propagandised as a cure, no matter the limited trial data, the secrecy of raw data, and the relative public ignorance of the toxicity of the placebos used in clinical drug trials.
Many new drugs are introduced that have a lower evidence base and higher risk profile than treatments and therapies using dietary nutritional supplements. It’s increasingly obvious to the public that government agencies exclusively rely on company supplied data for the introduction of new drugs for common chronic conditions.
Conversely, government agencies actively desist from exploring the scientific literature and surveying clinicians and practitioners to assess the evidence on the role of cheaper existing dietary nutrient supplements in safely preventing addressing chronic conditions.
But of course, the drug companies will not trial predominantly non-patentable micronutrients. There is no financial benefit for them. This is, of course, standard market failure.
Yet Western governments, including our Ministry of Health, have persistently over decades, abjectly failed to step in and address this market failure.
The Ministry of Health has the power to increase funding for testing services to assess nutritional deficiency by age and stage, and to expand nutrient access for treatment of chronic conditions (mental and physical). Funding is documented in the budget estimates (appropriation) ‘Vote Health’ includes funding for Pharmac to both manage and purchase pharmaceuticals. The science budget could also be harnessed to earmark funding expressly for nutrition.
Shane Reti has the chance to be another mindless Ministerial drone and perpetuate the medicalisation myth, or create a legacy.
A wide catchment of public health and practitioner physicians and experts would support Reti in such a policy shift, as they too are frustrated in having ‘one arm tied behind their back’.
Budget time is coming up. For the sake of our health, including the health of our children, let’s support Reti in making a change, not hiding inside the status quo.
