(NaturalNews) We here at NaturalNews cannot stress enough how important it is to take the time to fight back against the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) latest assault against vitamins and dietary supplements.

Proposed guidelines put forth by the agency for "New Dietary Ingredients" (NDIs) propose treating vitamins, herbs, and dietary supplements as synthetic food preservatives, which means pulling many of them off the market, and subjecting the rest to extreme regulatory protocols that will drive up costs and severely limit availability.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Information Act of 1994 (DSHEA), as many NaturalNews readers likely already know, was a major victory achieved for health freedom. It is also the foundation upon which the dietary supplement market as well as the health of millions of Americans has thrived.

Part of this legislation, however, outlines that the FDA must establish a final rule for how supplement manufacturers are to notify the agency of NDIs, a mandate that the FDA finally got around to addressing back in July. But what the FDA came up with as a solution is the complete opposite of what DSHEA, and the Congress that passed it, intended for the agency to do.

Instead of creating a simple method of notification as it was supposed to do, the FDA decided instead to manipulate and distort the NDI notification process by turning it into a type of regulatory approval process, similar to what drug companies are required to complete in order to get new drugs approved.

Under the proposed FDA guidelines, vitamin and dietary supplement manufacturers will have to submit applications for approval, rather than notifications of use, for all new ingredients or ingredient blends they use that were not in widespread use prior to 1994 when DSHEA was passed.

Because of tricky language contained in the proposal, practically all supplements currently on the market will be subjected to these new guidelines, as the FDA considers things like changed dosages and altered ingredient formulations with new ingredients.

This means that manufacturers of high-dose vitamin D, for instance, will be required to submit new NDI applications if the doses they sell were not in widespread use prior to DSHEA's passage in 1994. And even if the FDA approves an individual company's application for a specific form and dose of vitamin D, each additional manufacturer of the same vitamin D form and dose would also have to submit individual NDI applications for their products as well.