The Big Lie About The Danger Of Vitamins

The latest round in conventional medicine's ongoing attempts to discredit, and ultimately outlaw, nutritional supplements is found in a highly questionable study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which claims that vitamins actually increase the risk of death. The study claims to have analyzed a collection of previous studies on Vitamin A, beta carotene, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and selenium, concluding that most of the nutrients are actually dangerous to human health.
To avoid getting fooled by questionable research on vitamins, you have to consider the financial interests of the source of this research. The Journal American Medical Association accepts millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies each year, and its pages are absolutely packed with drug ads. The American Medical Association, for its part, has long worked to discredit alternative medicine and has even been found guilty by U.S. federal courts of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic medicine.

The AMA, which is largely considered a joke by anyone familiar with natural health, is hardly a credible source for publishing scientific findings on nutrition. To protect the multi-billion dollar drug industry, the AMA would say practically anything it seems.

Faking a vitamin study to show supplements as harmful is extremely easy to pull off. All you need to do is use low cost, synthetic forms of the vitamins and avoid using natural, food-source vitamins. These synthetic vitamins are really just industrial chemicals which may be called "Vitamin E" or "Vitamin A" or even "Vitamin C" but they have no functional resemblance to the real vitamins that occur in nature or in fact quality supplements derived from natural sources.

Every single study over the past two decades that has sought to discredit Vitamin E , for example, focused on using synthetic Vitamin E in order to show harm. It is curious that no researcher from the world of conventional medicine will ever test the natural, full-spectrum vitamins, nutrients and phytochemicals that appear in nature. The reason is that they would discover a universe of natural medicine that makes patented prescription drugs obsolete.

A second way to fake a vitamin meta-data study is to simply cherry-pick the results you want to include in your meta-data analysis. This is a routine trick used by dishonest researchers who have an agenda of discrediting nutritional supplements. To accomplish this , they simply eliminate all previous studies that showed positive results for vitamins, and include only previous studies that showed negative results.
Then they run a statistical analysis on all the studies they hand-picked and declare DANGER! Many of the studies on vitamin E were conducted on dying heart patients who were only expected to live two weeks, regardless of what they took.

A third way to distort the science is to confuse people with statistical obfuscation. The reporting on this particular study, for example, confuses absolute risk with relative risk. Vitamin A, according to the reports on this study, increased mortality risk by 16 percent. But that is a relative risk number, meaning that if 1 person out of 100 normally died, then 1.16 people out of 100 would die when taking these synthetic Vitamin A supplements. In other words, it might not even be one additional person out of 100, or even out of 1000.

And yet, it is curious that when conventional medical researchers report the results of mortality risks for their prescription drugs, they always use absolute risk. They say things like, ". . . this drug only increased the risk by one percent." But what they are not saying is that it may be a 200% relative increase in mortality risk, depending on the baseline absolute mortality numbers. So if only 0.5 people out of 100 normally died from heart disease during a particular study, but 1.5 people died when taking a drug during that study, the relative risk increase is 200%. But the medical journals and the mainstream media will report is at a "one percent increase."

Now you can see how the game is played. All statistics on the dangers of prescription drugs are reported as absolute risk to make the numbers seem smaller and make drugs seem safe. All statistics on the dangers of synthetic vitamins are reported as relative risk to make the numbers seem larger and therefore make vitamins seem dangerous.

And this is how conventional medicine lies with statistics. It's only one of the many tricks used to lie to the American public about the dangers of pharmaceuticals or the benefits of nutrition.

However, if you take cheap "vitamins" made of synthetic chemicals, you are doing yourself more harm than good. These cheap vitamin manufacturers, by the way, are usually owned by pharmaceutical firms. But conventional medicine researchers try to blur the line between "junk vitamins" and "quality vitamins" by classifying all nutritional supplements as "vitamins," regardless of what they're really made from.

By discrediting a few synthetic chemicals, they can effectively dissuade the masses from taking ANY vitamins, including the good ones. That is, of course, their goal. The want to use fear, uncertainty and doubt to scare consumers away from nutritional supplements so that patients will flock to the patented, synthetic chemicals that earn drug companies billions of dollars in profits.

Drugs make money for big pharmaceutical companies, and vitamins compete with drug sales. Once you understand the economics and the motives of the parties involved here, the junk science con becomes quite obvious. Pushers of pharmaceuticals will always use dirty tricks to discredit nutritional supplements because it is in their financial interests to do so.

Now, here's a common sense way to quickly realize the JAMA research is complete nonsense. Round up 100 people who are taking multiple pharmaceuticals, and compare their health to 100 people who are taking vitamins and nutritional supplements. The supplement crowd will be healthier every time. If vitamins are so dangerous, where are all the dead vitamin takers? And if pharmaceuticals are so safe, where are all the super-healthy prescription drug patients?

The healthiest people, by far, are those who take supplements, who engage in regular exercise, and who avoid taking prescription drugs. They think all health effects are achieved by single, isolated chemical constituents.

There is a common misconception that "natural" vitamins and minerals are extracted from plants in their pure form and as such are superior to "synthetic" vitamins and minerals which are made in a laboratory. However, some vitamin and antioxidant compounds can be efficiently synthesized in factories to produce products that are identical in chemical form to those found in nature and that are pure and fully safe.

In addition, some synthetic vitamins are preferentially absorbed over food sources.

There is no money to be made in being happy and healthy. And Pharmaceutical companies are wolves in sheep's clothing just look at the website government funded http://www.healthypeople.gov. So far we have not seen one single bit of information on alternative medicine options and therapies. You might want to check it our for a good laugh and eye opening shock of how far entrenched the Pharmaceutical companies are with control over the American's information of "healthy options".

The article above is a summary and was taken from The big vitamin scare: American Medical Association claims vitamins may kill you (opinion)