In July 2008, the European Commission requested EFSA to give a scientific opinion on the community list of permitted health claims pursuant to Article 13.1 of Regulation 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods.
To this end, EFSA received from the European Commission the terms of reference and a consolidated list of claims submitted by member states containing over 4,000 main entry health claims with corresponding conditions of use and references for about 10,000 similar claims.
The list is the result of a consolidation process carried out by the commission after examining over 44,000 claims supplied by member states.
The consolidated list has been screened by EFSA and those main entry health claims for which EFSA considered that insufficient information had been provided on the list (over 2,000) were referred back to the European commission/member states for further information or clarification.
For the remaining claims, EFSA started the assessment. In this context, the first series of opinions covering over 500 health claims was adopted by the NDA Panel on 2 July 2009 and published on 1 October 2009.
In addition, a number of claims were referred back to the commission in June 2009 for consideration of their eligibility (approximately 220 so-called product specific claims and approximately 90 comparative claims).
In the light of the experience gained to date, EFSA has prepared this briefing document to update member states and the European Commission on the evaluation of Article 13.1 health claims. The briefing document will be updated as appropriate as additional issues are addressed.
Click here for full details on the EFSA website.
Source: EFSA
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