Are Vitamins Worthless?

We have been reading a bunch of crap about how vitamins do not really work to prevent cancer, help with overall health or prevent aging. You may have read about the Journal of The American Medical Association study, which found that vitamin E and vitamin C did not prevent heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death in this group of men. You likely also heard about research presented at the recent annual American Association for Cancer Research conference showing that vitamins C and E didn’t protect these men against cancer either.

But most of these reports failed to mention that study participants were only taking 500 mg of vitamin C daily and 400 IU of synthetic vitamin E every other day. A minimum reasonable intake of vitamin C is 1,000 mg, and anyone familiar with how antioxidants work would never prescribe synthetic vitamin E, much less in an every-other-day dosage.

The press also neglected to reveal that the men in the trial were considered to be “adherent” if they took their supplements two-thirds of the time—and about a quarter didn’t even meet that minimal requirement. Yet even the noncompliant participants were included in study results. I’d have to agree with the editor of the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine who said the JAMA study was “an intervention designed to fail.” Unfortunately, most media outlets took the low road and reported that vitamins C and E are worthless. This is absolutely not true, and it’s particularly egregious when you consider that only a very small percentage of the American public gets even the ridiculously low RDA of these two important vitamins.

Our advice is that you simply ignore this nonsense since hundreds of studies demonstrate the benefits of these and other antioxidants. At the very minimum you should take 1,000 mg of vitamin C, 2,000 mg D and 400 IU of natural vitamin E every day.