PRESS RELEASE

Five Parliamentary Bills fail to deliver environmental monitoring framework

16 September 2026 | Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand

Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand (PSGR NZ) is calling on Members of Parliament not to approve five Bills currently progressing through Parliament until critical gaps in environmental monitoring, risk assessment and precaution are addressed.

In an Open Letter sent to MPs today, PSGR NZ warns that the legislation fails to establish an integrated system for monitoring anthropogenic contaminants and novel organisms, despite a 2023 National Party election commitment to implement eight recommendations made by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in 2022.

The five Bills span environmental management, gene technology, hazardous substances, agricultural compounds and environmental reporting.

“New Zealand cannot effectively regulate what it does not identify, monitor and understand,” PSGR NZ lead researcher Jodie Bruning says.

“Public officials at MPI, the EPA and WorkSafe need legislation that enables them to protect human and environmental health. That means being able to detect emerging harms, learn from evidence overseas and act precautionarily when potentially serious harm is scientifically plausible but uncertain.”

PSGR NZ says the problem is particularly concerning because several of the Bills seek to accelerate or streamline regulatory decision-making while failing to establish corresponding obligations to monitor what happens after substances or novel organisms are released.

The Open Letter points to a recent example involving 104 undisclosed experimental pesticide substances approved by the EPA for trials under applications APP205201 and APP205221. Public documents state that APP205201 includes novel compounds that have not been assessed by any overseas regulatory authority. PSGR NZ is now seeking information from the EPA, MPI and WorkSafe about how these substances were assessed and how worker exposure and unexpected environmental or health effects will be detected.

The organisation also raises concerns about proposed changes to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms framework, the absence of an express precautionary framework across the reforms, and provisions enabling greater reliance on overseas regulatory decisions without requiring New Zealand regulators to identify and use the most recent relevant assessments or best regulatory practice. PSGR NZ trustee Dr Elvira Dommisse, a former scientist on New Zealand’s GE onion research programme, says:

“If regulators don't know what could be released, where it could go and possibly persist in the environment, what it could break down into and what effects could emerge over time, they are powerless to protect human or environmental health. The same principle applies to potentially heritable new organisms created using gene-editing technologies: we need to understand where they could spread and what could happen over time before decisions are made about their release.”

PSGR NZ says environmental monitoring should form part of the country's core regulatory infrastructure, rather than remain fragmented across individual agencies and pieces of legislation.

“These Bills could have represented an opportunity for strategic, integrative reform. They are being progressed together, yet none establishes the integrated monitoring and assessment system needed to understand what is accumulating in our water, soils and ecosystems, or what that exposure may mean for human health,” Bruning says.

“We are asking Parliament to send these Bills back to the drawing board. Chemical and new organism approvals need to reflect international best practice, precaution should be embedded at the highest levels of decision-making, and New Zealand needs an integrated monitoring and assessment programme capable of protecting our waters, soils, flora, fauna and human health for generations to come.”

ENDS

Media contact:
Jodie Bruning
Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand
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PSGR.org.nz

Open Letter: Parliamentary Bills Fail to Deliver an Environmental Monitoring Framework
16 September 2026

In 2019 the Soil & Health Association and PSGRNZ released the joint paper Aotearoa New Zealand Policy Proposals on healthy waterways: Are they fit for Purpose? Our white paper highlighted a critical gap in the Government’s Action for Healthy Waterways proposals.

We sent submissions into the related consultations, and sent out press releases to all media. The concerns expressed in that 2019 paper were not covered by the media, despite the fact that a major government consultation was underway.

Seven years ago, we discussed at length that a freshwater policy cannot credibly protect waterways for future generations if it did not have a systematic way to identify and investigate significant chemical contaminants.

The Government was prepared to discuss sediment, bacteria and nutrients. There were measures (called attributes) for nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved oxygen, E. coli, sediment, periphyton, cyanobacteria, macroinvertebrates and fish communities which were subsequently incorporated into the National Environment Standards for Freshwater framework - the NES-FW.

What the proposed new standards did not build in, was an equivalent national architecture for anthropogenic chemical contaminants from urban, industrial and agricultural sources.

Despite our best efforts (and we were aware that a wider public were also sending their chemical pollutant concerns into the committee) the issue ‘was disappeared’. The Ministry’s Summary of submissions, published in May 2020, responsible for summarising 17,500 submissions, only mentioned chemical pollution fleetingly. The document noted calls to investigate ‘emerging contaminants’ because of their implications for human and ecosystem health, and elsewhere records concerns about chemicals and emerging contaminants in stormwater and drinking water.

It isn’t just us. Over this same period, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton has repeatedly raised these concerns - including at the highest levels. His reports and papers in 2019 2020 2021 2022 2026 are testament to a sustained effort to improve New Zealand’s environmental knowledge and reporting systems. Yet remarkably little seems to change.

The problem, seven years later in late 2026, is that several parliamentary Bills which claim to improve environmental stewardship, continue to fail to address the problem - the gap - that we identified so many years ago. If a government agency does not specifically require that a process is followed, and then also fund the work so that it can be done - it will not be done.

Environmental Reporting Amendment Bill 321-1 - 20/8/2026 PSGR Submission to Select committee.
Natural Environment Bill 234-2 - 13/2/2026 PSGR Submission to Select committee.
Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill (304-1) – 3/6/2026 PSGR Submission to Select committee.

At every opportunity, we have highlighted the risks. When we cannot know what is happening, we cannot stop it! We have highlighted the problems that arise when higher-level legislation fails to establish adequate frameworks requiring officials to detect, monitor and investigate chemical contamination. Without those frameworks, agencies may have no systematic process for determining whether industrial chemicals, agrichemicals, wastewater contaminants or other human-made substances are contributing to the degradation of a groundwater source, lake or river, and then feeding that knowledge back into regulatory decisions.

The government had commenced a work programme in 2022 in response to the PCE’s eight recommendations, outlined in his 2022 paper: Environmental reporting, research and investment. Do we know if we’re making a difference? But, even though it was a National Party 2023 election manifesto, by 2024, the programme was to all appearances, discarded:

‘I am refusing your request in full under section 18(e) of the Act as the information requested does not exist or, despite reasonable efforts to locate it, cannot be found. … there is currently no work to establish a nationally consistent monitoring framework for anthropogenic synthetic chemical contaminants in freshwater.’

Currently, government monitoring is largely organised around the national environment standards for freshwater (NES-F) a relatively narrow set of established indicators and contaminants, including nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, microbial indicators such as E. coli, sediment, and selected metals and other known contaminants. What is largely missing is a systematic framework for detecting and investigating the much wider range of synthetic chemicals entering the environment, including pesticides and their metabolites, PFAS, pharmaceuticals, plastic-associated chemicals, industrial chemicals and complex mixtures.

If we do not routinely look for these substances, it becomes very difficult to establish where they are occurring, at what concentrations, whether they are contributing to ecological degradation, or whether regulation needs to change.

This becomes particularly important at the level of the local receiving environment. Existing freshwater monitoring and national standards may tell council staff that a river, lake or groundwater body is degraded, but that does not necessarily provide them with the investigative framework needed to determine why.

Where the familiar indicators do not adequately explain the observed degradation, there is no sufficiently developed framework that guides officials towards a progressively broader suite of chemical testing based on plausible local sources and pathways.

That might mean looking beyond nutrients, E. coli, sediment and selected metals to pesticides and their metabolites, PFAS, pharmaceuticals, plastic-associated chemicals, industrial chemicals, wastewater contaminants and, ultimately, relevant mixtures.

We raised this issue in 2019, when the government had $221 for freshwater improvement, and we (and all the groups that supported our paper) were ignored.

The critical missing step is therefore the bridge between detecting degradation and investigating causation. A functioning environmental-health system should enable an unexplained signal of harm to trigger progressively more sophisticated investigation, identify plausible contaminants and sources, and feed those findings back into monitoring, regulation and pollution prevention. Without that capability, we can know that a receiving environment is degraded while remaining remarkably poorly equipped to discover what is degrading it.

As of 2026 we have no Ministry for the Environment. We have a Secretary for the Environment (see Environment Act 1986, part 2). It is unclear whether that Secretary has the authority and resources to undertake the important work that is required to bring attention to the challenge from anthropogenic, manmade synthetic chemical pollutants.

Keep an eye out for ta response to this Official Information Act request NGOIA162 / 26-OIAD-02614. Hopefully we might find out a little more on this issue.

More information is available on a related Op Ed: Labour & National had $221 million for Freshwater Improvement. They didn’t ask about the Chemicals. New Zealand keeps rewriting environmental law without building the science frameworks to detect chemical harm. (September 2, 2026)

These fantastic organisations supported our 2019 white paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Policy Proposals on healthy waterways: Are they fit for Purpose? (2019) Published by: The Soil and Health Association of New Zealand and Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility Charitable Trust New Zealand Wellington, New Zealand Cover Image: N.Thamm ISBN (digital) 978-0-473-50130-3

PSGRNZ is currently publishing a series of Substack articles examining the regulation of RF-EMF in New Zealand and the growing scientific debate surrounding non-thermal RF-EMF exposures. The articles argue that the prevailing consensus position is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the expanding body of experimental, mechanistic, and observational research. They also examine whether more scientists internationally are now drawing attention to potential risks from non-thermal exposures than are actively asserting that such exposures pose no health risk.

EMF Sensitive? You May Not Be the Outlier You Think You Are

Part 1. An intro to New Zealand regulatory frameworks; why your concerns are outside the framework; and how EMF radiation regulation came to differ so much from toxic chemicals regulation.

A palpable under-representation of public health expertise.

Part 2. A committee weighted toward policy, monitoring standards and compliance, not comprehensive health risk evaluation.

The EMF Problem: RF Radiation Governance Without Democratic Risk Assessment.

Part 3. How ICNIRP became the central organising authority for RF-EMF safety standards across much of the world despite the absence of modern environmental public health risk assessment frameworks.

EMF Risk Blindspot: The role of modulation in signal interaction

Part 4. Voltage-Gated Ion Channels are like electrically controlled floodgates in the body’s communication network. Calcium is a central message carrier flowing through those gates.

The Wired and Unwell Cascade.

Part 5. The science linking wireless radiation to brain and nervous system harm.

RF-EMF: Three Biological Pathways, One Upstream Driver

Part 6. Different pathways disturb different oscillators but ultimately affect the same biological timing network.

OFFICIAL INFORMATION ACT REQUESTS

Ministry for Primary Industries

REQUEST: AUGUST 20, 2026 Request No. OIA26-0675
RESPONSE: SEPTEMBER 8, 2026 Request No. OIA26-0675
NEW REQUEST: SEPTEMBER 17, 2026

Department of Conservation

REQUEST: AUGUST 18, 2026 Request No. OIAD-9589
RESPONSE: SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 Request No. OIAD-9589
NEW REQUEST: SEPTEMBER 17, 2026

What is happening?

DOC has begun a programme to vaccinate approximately 300 core breeding birds from some of New Zealand's most threatened native species against H5N1 avian influenza. These include kākāpō, takahē, tūturuatu/shore plover, kakī/black stilt and kākāriki karaka/orange-fronted parakeet. This is a significant intervention because these are small, threatened populations and some of the birds are extremely important to the survival of their species.

Why are we asking questions?

DOC publicly described its 2024–2025 vaccination trial as showing that vaccination was 'safe and effective' and would help protect these birds from H5N1. But the trial did not expose vaccinated birds to H5N1. It measured antibody responses as a proxy for expected protection, and the trial report itself stated that overall efficacy would not be known until natural exposure occurred.

The vaccine being used now is not the vaccine that was trialled.

The threatened-bird trial used an H5N3 vaccine, Poulvac Flufend (A009733). The approximately 300 birds in the 2026 programme are instead to receive a different H5N2 vaccine (A012218). The earlier threatened-species trial therefore cannot, by itself, establish the safety or protective efficacy of the different product now being administered to these birds.

‘Highly pathogenic’ does not mean every infected species will suffer high mortality.

Pathogenicity concerns the capacity of a virus to cause disease. Different bird species can experience very different disease severity and mortality. The important conservation question is therefore not simply whether H5N1 is classified as HPAI, but what evidence shows that each of these threatened species faces a sufficiently serious risk of disease, death or population decline to justify intervention.

What triggered vaccination?

DOC has described the detection of H5N1 in migratory seabirds in Australia as a ‘trigger to start vaccinating some of our most critically endangered’ New Zealand birds. But neither MPI's One Health document nor the related Cabinet paper identifies a published threshold for moving from preparedness into vaccination. The unanswered question is: what risk-benefit assessment showed that this trigger justified vaccinating these particular populations?

Vaccination itself is not risk-free.

These birds must be captured, restrained and injected, potentially repeatedly if boosters are required. Some free-living birds may then be difficult to recapture and monitor. The risk calculation therefore has two sides: the risk posed by H5N1 to each species versus the known and uncertain risks associated with intervention.

There are important unanswered questions about the original trial.

The published material does not provide the complete underlying numbers showing how many birds of each species were actually vaccinated, subsequently tested and followed over time. H5N1-specific HI testing was undertaken only in takahē, and chicken-derived thresholds were used to infer expected protection.

What are we asking DOC and MPI to disclose?

The OIA requests seek the underlying trial data; deaths, adverse events and longer-term outcomes; species-specific evidence of H5N1 risk; the scientific basis for extrapolating antibody responses to protection; the evidence supporting use of the different H5N2 vaccine; the expected booster regime; and the records showing who decided to proceed, according to what criteria, and how the programme was funded. MPI's own documentation for the H5N2 product says ‘Full efficacy and potency data is pending’ and ‘Duration of immunity is not established.’

The central message:

This is a novel intervention - the responsible authorities must demonstrate that they have adequately deliberated on the risks and benefits, and that the scientific evidence relied upon was sufficiently robust to support the intervention. When an unprecedented intervention involves core breeding animals from highly threatened species, the evidence supporting both the expected benefit and the risks of intervention should be transparent, species-specific and available for independent scrutiny before further intervention occurs.

September Update following the Rejection of the August Official Information Act Requests

The first two requests, sent to MPI OIA26-0675 and DOC OIAD-9589 in August 2026, were rejected (MPI rejection; DOC rejection). The responses pointed to information already publicly available and refused the remaining material principally on the basis that locating and providing it would require substantial collation or research.

Scientifically, and from a policy and governance perspective, significant decisions are usually distilled into a relatively narrow set of records. The underlying scientific literature may be extensive, but the evidence relied upon for a particular decision is ordinarily evaluated, summarised or communicated through identifiable assessments, advice, briefings or decision documents.

This should be particularly true here. The programme concerns a defined and unprecedented intervention in core breeding populations of highly threatened species, involving approximately 300 birds from five species, a specific disease threat and a specific vaccine. The decision was made over a relatively short period and would reasonably be expected to involve a relatively small group of senior scientific, veterinary and programme personnel.

If MPI and DOC determined that the risk from H5N1 justified intervening in these core breeding populations, somebody made that recommendation or decision. If it was scientifically informed, somebody considered the relevant evidence. There should therefore be a reasonably short and identifiable chain connecting the scientific evidence, its assessment by responsible scientific personnel, the advice provided to senior decision-makers, and the recommendation or decision to proceed.

In a democracy, consequential decisions by public agencies should leave an identifiable record showing the evidence considered, the reasoning applied, the advice given and who ultimately authorised the decision.

The published trial cannot, on its own, provide a sufficiently transparent scientific basis for the intervention. It involved very small cohorts, did not undertake viral challenge, used antibody responses as a proxy for protection, and expressly acknowledges that overall efficacy will not be known until natural challenge occurs.

Of particular scientific concern, its principal results are reported as percentages without consistently providing the underlying numbers tested at each time point, despite deaths, difficulties with recapture, incomplete vaccination and adverse events associated with capture and handling. If these percentages and antibody responses formed a material part of the justification for progressing to vaccination of approximately 300 core breeding birds, the absence of transparent denominators, individual outcomes and accounting for loss to follow-up is deeply concerning.

Without these data, attrition and potential attrition bias cannot be independently assessed, nor can the strength and durability of the observed immune response be adequately evaluated. An antibody response used as a proxy for protection cannot itself establish protection against H5N1 disease or mortality.

These are not frivolous or arbitrary requests. They arise from a genuine concern that consequential scientific decisions affecting highly threatened species should be demonstrably evidence-based, transparent and accountable. Trust in science depends upon the scientific process being open to scrutiny. Where scientific evidence is relied upon to justify consequential public policy, confidence cannot rest simply upon an agency's declaration that the evidence is trustworthy. The underlying methods, data, assumptions, uncertainties and inferential steps should be sufficiently transparent for the reasoning to be independently examined.

This is particularly important because the vaccination programme appears to depend upon several scientific bridges.

The 2024–2025 trial did not undertake an H5N1 challenge. DOC expressly states that overall efficacy will not be known until natural challenge occurs and defines ‘efficacy’ in the trial report as the detection of antibodies following vaccination. Antibody persistence is itself described as only an approximate measure of duration of protection.

Further, H5N1-specific haemagglutination-inhibition testing was undertaken only in takahē. The thresholds used to infer expected protection from mortality and morbidity were derived from chickens. The resulting inference must therefore bridge from chicken-derived protective thresholds to takahē and, potentially, from takahē to the other threatened species for which equivalent H5N1-specific HI testing was not reported.

There is an additional vaccine bridge. The experimental trial used the H5N3 vaccine Poulvac Flufend i AI H5N3 RG, whereas the 2026 programme is proceeding using a different H5N2 vaccine. The relevant policy question is therefore not simply whether vaccination produced antibodies, but what scientific evidence demonstrates that immune responses generated by the trial vaccine are informative about protection afforded by the vaccine now being used against contemporary H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b.

International veterinary guidance similarly recognises these limitations. The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) and the WOAH/FAO Network of Expertise on Animal Influenza (OFFLU) recognise vaccination as a potentially valuable complementary measure for controlling highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), including in particular circumstances involving wild birds. However, WOAH treats vaccination as one component of a wider risk-based control strategy, rather than as a conclusion flowing simply from the detection of antibodies.

WOAH's guidance on emergency vaccination of wild birds describes a decision process encompassing outbreak epidemiology, target populations, the vaccine and vaccination strategy, diagnostic capacity, regulatory considerations and available resources. It also acknowledges that vaccination of free-ranging wildlife remains limited and places vaccination within a broader process of risk assessment and coordinated response planning.

Of particular relevance to the question of vaccine matching, OFFLU's Avian Influenza Matching (AIM) programme exists because antigenic variation among circulating HPAI viruses can reduce vaccine effectiveness. OFFLU notes that this is particularly important for killed, inactivated adjuvanted vaccines that depend substantially upon humoral immune responses. The OFFLU-AIM programme therefore compares the antigenic characteristics of circulating viruses with vaccine antigens to assist governments in selecting and updating appropriate vaccines. Its July 2024 assessment reports substantial variation in antigenic distance between contemporary H5 viruses and different vaccine antigens.

The fact that a vaccine and circulating virus both possess an H5 haemagglutinin therefore does not, by itself, establish equivalent protective efficacy. Relevant considerations include antigenic matching, vaccine formulation and potency, dose and vaccination regime, the immune response of the target species, and the relationship between measured antibody titres and clinically meaningful protection.

PSGR NZ therefore considers it reasonable to expect identifiable scientific records showing how DOC addressed these evidential bridges before progressing from a small experimental H5N3 trial to vaccination of approximately 300 core breeding birds using a different H5N2 vaccine. There should likewise be an identifiable record of the scientific evidence and advice informing MPI's role in the programme and the pathway by which the decision to proceed was reached.

Policy-relevant science depends upon more than an assertion that a decision was evidence-based. The evidence, reasoning and uncertainties must be capable of scrutiny. If the scientific basis for this intervention is sound and defensible, the principal records demonstrating that basis should be capable of public release.

HAVE YOU CHECKED OUT OUR SUBSTACK:

SCIENCE, STEWARDSHIP & SCALABILITY?

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We welcome your use of this resource but please cite:

PSGRNZ (2026) Reclaiming Health: Reversal, Remission & Rewiring. Understanding & Addressing the Primary Drivers of New Zealand’s Metabolic & Mental Health Crisis. Bruning, J.R., Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand. ISBN 978-1-0670678-2-3

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In conclusion, substantial evidence indicates that current dietary guidelines have not stemmed rising rates of metabolic and mental disorders and, in several respects, may be contributing to the progression of illness. Health is complex, multifactorial, and dynamic. As defined by the World Health Organization:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.[1]

The onset of multimorbidity at earlier ages is strongly associated with poorer long-term outcomes. Rising rates of multimorbidity, alongside equity in medication prescribing, are not proxies for improved wellbeing or quality of life.

This Report demonstrates that New Zealand’s health policy has rested on outdated assumptions while nutritional and metabolic science has advanced. Current Ministry of Health positions, echoed by government-aligned organisations, stand in sharp contrast to an expanding body of evidence showing that foundational dietary and supplementary approaches can reverse or mitigate many metabolic and neurological conditions, improving functionality, wellbeing, and quality of life.

Encouragingly, change is already underway. Case and cohort studies consistently show that substantial reductions in refined carbohydrate intake are associated with improvement, remission, and in some cases reversal across a wide range of metabolic and brain-related conditions.[2] [3] There is increasing consensus that compulsive overconsumption of refined carbohydrates, particularly in the form of ultra-processed foods, constitutes a form of substance-use disorder. Health coaching, peer support, and community-based programmes can facilitate dietary change and, in doing so, reduce the burden of metabolic and neurological disorders as well as pharmaceutical dependence.

Dr Jen Unwin, co-partner of the UK clinic that has pioneered approaches to reversing metabolic syndrome, reducing prescribing rates, and improving mental health outcomes, has described counselling, coaching, and support as ‘fantastically cheerful medicine’. Yet conventional therapeutic frameworks do not treat long-term dietary change as a clinical intervention in the same way pharmaceutical treatments are regarded.

The protection and promotion of health require officials to remain abreast of contemporary science concerning the central role of diet and nutrition in metabolic regulation, hormonal balance, and homeostasis. Vulnerable groups, including infants, children and adolescents, pregnant women, and those with elevated metabolic risk, have received insufficient attention. Indeed, agencies currently lack a clear understanding of what constitutes optimal nutrition by age and life stage. Government bodies have consistently failed to examine the relationships between diet quality, nutrient insufficiency, and the physiological demands imposed by age, sex, ethnicity, genetic variability, socioeconomic context, pregnancy, and inflammatory status.

Historic alignment with international dietary frameworks used in Australia, the United States, and Nordic countries has not succeeded in halting or reversing the rise of prediabetes, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or mental illness. In the decades following the adoption of current guidelines, multimorbidity in younger age groups has increased markedly. Current policy frameworks emphasise the LDL cholesterol marker, minimise the importance of key macronutrients, fat and protein, and fail to link micronutrient sufficiency with optimal physiological function and resilience.

Public-good research in nutrition science, including the investment required to update regulations and policies through transparent reviews of the scientific literature, has been neglected, deprioritised, and underfunded. As a result, independent scientists that can challenge current assumptions are rare, and government policy remains largely silent on the carbohydrate–insulin pathway and insufficiently responsive to individual metabolic risk.

The technology to detect elevated risk for prediabetes is readily available, and the capacity to screen for nutrient deficiencies in people presenting with mental-health conditions is well established. Yet these interventions remain underutilised, restricted, or unrecognised. Over the same period, funding for pharmaceutical access has expanded, while research into drug risks and adverse effects has been comparatively underfunded. Drug trial data are difficult to access, if not opaque, and governments have not provided adequate funding to independently evaluate industry claims or to systematically assess harms alongside benefits.

In these knowledge gaps, officials appear disproportionately focused on potential risks associated with nutritional supplements, despite long histories of safe use and contradictory evidence, while adverse drug risks are largely left to voluntary disclosure by manufacturers. This reflects a deeper contradiction: the Ministry of Health has the authority to set clinical limits for nutrients, yet is not positioned as an authority on optimal nutrition or its role in sustaining metabolic and mental health.

Suboptimal diets and nutrient insufficiencies amplify risk across a broad spectrum of chronic conditions, including metabolic syndrome and complex multimorbidity, yet when knowledge is absent or incomplete, clinicians, families, and patients are denied meaningful choice. Informed consent cannot be achieved when upstream dietary options are neither explained nor endorsed.

This Report, together with the forthcoming companion report on micronutrients and mental health, demonstrates that a longstanding governance culture has placed carbohydrate science, the carbohydrate–insulin model, and nutritional sufficiency outside the scope of formal health policy for decades. Without system-wide correction, continued institutional reticence and gaps in nutritional understanding will perpetuate poor policy and poor outcomes.

There is, however, strong cause for optimism. Current metabolic and mental-health trends are not inevitable. They are reversible. With evidence-based, nutrition-centred health policy, the trajectory of chronic disease in New Zealand can be changed, and health reclaimed. This Report sets out practical pathways to address the primary drivers of the metabolic and mental-health crisis and to reclaim health.

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REFERENCES

NB: Number order differs from the original Reclaiming Health publication (PDF).

[1] World Health Organization. Health and Well-being. https://www.who.int/Data/Gho/Data/Major-Themes/Health-and-Well-Being

[2] Zheng, Q., Gao, X., Ruan, X. et al. (2025) Are low-carbohydrate diet interventions beneficial for metabolic syndrome and its components? A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Int J Obes DOI:10.1038/s41366-025-01822-5

[3] Athinarayanan SJ, Roberts CGP, Phinney SD et al. (2025). Effects of a continuous remote care intervention including nutritional ketosis on kidney function and inflammation in adults with type 2 diabetes: a post-hoc latent class trajectory analysis. Front. Nutr. Sec. Nutrition and Metabolism, Vol 12 – 2025, DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1609737

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For over 20 years the Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand Charitable Trust (PSGR) has produced reports and submitted to government Bills and Inquiries.

We’ve been extraordinarily busy over the past 2 years with our work.

This Update aims to inform members and colleagues – and act as a go-to summary of our recent work.

2022 UPDATE - PDF

As well as our recent work All PSGR’s submissions are available to the public on our Submissions pages. In addition, we are now on LinkedIn, Twitter, Odysee & Instagram.

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Please – without your support and membership PSGR cannot do this work. We’ve kept our fees deliberately low because your membership is important to us.

MOVING FORWARD 2022+

The PSGR recognise that the perspectives that have been expressed by the PSGR from 2020 onwards will not necessarily reflect the perspectives of all trustees and all members.

However, we sincerely hope that PSGR’s perspectives are more likely to reflect the perspectives of the majority of our membership and of collegial organisations – which represents a diverse quorum of inquiring minds.

We hope that we have demonstrated a consistency to our work, that reflects and upholds the principles reflected in 20 years of research, information communications and submissions to policy

Parliamentary Bills Fail to Deliver an Environmental Monitoring Framework

WE CAN DETECT DEGRADATION, BUT NOT WHAT IS CAUSING IT

PSGRNZ Series: The dys-regulation of radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMF).

H5N1 VACCINATION OF ENDANGERED NATIVE BIRDS

HAVE YOU CHECKED OUT OUR SUBSTACK:

SCIENCE, STEWARDSHIP & SCALABILITY?

Conclusion: Reversing Surging Multimorbidity with 'Fantastically Cheerful' Medicine.

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2022 UPDATE - PDF

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MOVING FORWARD 2022+

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