Why We Do Not Make Health Claims
We sell saffron as food. We do not tell you what it does to your body, and there are rules behind that rather than coyness.
We sell saffron as food. We do not tell you what it does to your body, and we are not going to start.
That is a choice with rules behind it, not coyness, and it is worth setting out plainly because almost every other saffron seller you will read does the opposite.
Two markets, one rule, two vocabularies
Most of what we send goes to the Gulf and to India. Both regulate what a food seller may say.
India's Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, at regulation 10(1):
"no claims shall be made which refer to the suitability of the food for use in the prevention, alleviation, treatment or cure of a disease, disorder or particular physiological condition unless specifically permitted under any other regulations made under Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006"
The UAE standard on permitted health and nutrition claims, at clause 11.1.4, prohibits:
"Claims show that a food can be used in the prevention, alleviation, treatment or cure of a disease, disorder or particular physiological condition."
Two jurisdictions, near-identical wording, same effect. A food is not permitted to be advertised as acting on a disease or a physiological condition.
A note on that second source, because this article would be a poor advertisement for its own argument otherwise. The operative UAE standard is GSO 2333, and it sits behind a paywall we have not paid. What we quoted is the 2018 final draft issued by the Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology and notified to the World Trade Organization, which is public. It is a draft. We are citing it as a draft and not pretending it is the settled text.
This page counts
It would be convenient to treat a blog as different from a label. The Indian regulation closes that off in its definitions, where an advertisement includes publicity or representation made by print, electronic media, internet or website.
So an article on this domain is covered. This one included.
Both regimes work from a list
Neither rule is only a prohibition. Both are built the same way: a set of claims is permitted, conditions attach to each, and anything outside the set needs prior approval from the authority.
We went looking for saffron in both permitted lists. We did not find it in the parts we were able to read.
That is the honest form of the finding and we are going to leave it in that form. We could not read the paywalled UAE standard, and one table in the draft did not extract cleanly. So the accurate statement is that we found no approved claim for saffron, not that none exists.
Research exists, and it is still not ours to repeat
There is published research on saffron. We know it is there. We are not going to summarise it, link it, or tell you what it looked at.
Two reasons, and the second is the real one.
The first is that none of it is about our tins. A study is about the material a laboratory was given, under conditions someone else chose.
The second is that a summary of research, published by the company selling the product, is not a neutral act. It becomes a representation about the food we sell, which is precisely what the two rules above address. Adding "this is not a claim" underneath does not change what the page is doing.
The version of this article that reads "here is what studies have examined" is the version we decided not to write. It would have brought traffic. It would also have been us saying, in a longer way, the thing we are telling you we do not say.
What we do say
Refusing one kind of statement is only worth something if we make the other kind properly.
Everything we assert about our saffron is a measurable property of the material, and every one of them has a document behind it:
- The three ISO 3632 values, crocin, picrocrocin and safranal, with the figures rather than the category alone.
- The laboratory that measured them and its accreditation.
- The lot number, so the report attaches to the tin you are holding.
- The cut, and what that word does and does not mean.
- Where it was grown, named down to the fields.
Those are claims we can be held to. If one is wrong, a test settles it, and our purity guarantee is written so that a failed test costs us the sale and the price of the test.
A claim about what saffron does inside a person cannot be settled that way by us, which is the other reason not to make it.
Where this is written down
None of this is new policy invented for an article. Our terms already carry it, and have from the start:
"Nothing on this site is medical advice. We make no claim that saffron treats, prevents or cures any condition. Speak to a doctor before using saffron medicinally, particularly if you are pregnant or taking medication."
That paragraph and this article say the same thing. This one just shows the regulations behind it.
The short version
We sell a spice. We will tell you what is in the tin, who measured it, and what the numbers were.
We will not tell you what it will do for you, because two regulators say a food seller may not, because we could not verify an approved claim in either permitted list, and because a company summarising research about its own product is making a claim whatever it calls the paragraph.
If you want to know what saffron does in the body, ask someone who is not selling it to you.