Vitamin Pills Kill ???

Many of the current main-stram news headlines claim vitamin pills increase risk of early death. This is pure bunk and we will dispell this now. At the center of this controversy is research recently conducted by Dr. Goran Bjelakovic of Copenhagen University in Denmark. This research, which involved a review of 67 studies on 230,000 healthy people, reportedly found "no convincing evidence" that any of the antioxidants studied helped prolong life expectancy but, in point of fact, actually increased mortality.

If this information seems vaguely familiar, it should be.

It was a lead story back in early 2007 when the meta-analysis appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It was noted that vitamin A, E and beta carotene may increase mortality risk by 16%. Vitamin C did not seem to have any clear effect. Little mention, however, was made of the fact that the mineral selenium is actually associated with a decrease of cause mortality by 9%. The authors of this paper further seemed to stack the deck against vitamins. They had reviewed a total of 815 different trials but included only 68 of them in their final analysis. There were over 400 trials that they reviewed in which the mortality rate was zero in both the vitamin group and the control group. They decided to exclude these over 400 trials because there was zero mortality.

If indeed they were trying to determine is there was truly some increased risk of mortality associated with vitamins, why not include the over 400 trials that showed no mortality whatsoever.

Furthermore within the 68 trials they decided whether they were low bias or high bias trials based on the way each study was conducted. When they looked at all 68 trials together they reported no significant effect on mortality. However when they selected out the 47 trials that they considered low bias (involving over 180,000 participants) that is when they saw some increased risk of mortality with some of the vitamins.

It is important to point out Denmark is in the European Union and their doctors and government tend to be very anti-vitamins and biased against supplements based on their absurd regulations.

And of course the main stream press picked up on this study making the sweeping comment that vitamins will kill you. The press is not interested in reporting the fair and balanced facts but rather sensational headlines.

We do not believe that anyone in the vitamin/nutrition business is advocating that you take only vitamin A, vitamin E and beta carotene as your nutritional supplements.

Some of the best health enhancing nutrients available were not analyzed in this paper such as alpha lipoic acid, coq10, omega-3 essential fatty acids, ginkgo, green tea, grape seed just to name a few.

At the present time there are many cancer centers throughout the United States including the National Cancer Institute that are studying nutrients like soy, green tea and curcumin for their health benefits. Since that meta-analysis came out last year there have been many wonderful studies on the benefits of vitamins/nutrients.

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine1 did a fabulous review article last July on the attributes of Vitamin D. Evidence indicates that at 2,000 — 4,000 IU per day of vitamin D3, a person can reduce various cancer risks by 50%.

Another prime example of the many favorable studies published within the past year not mentioned in the media is the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition3, which reported last June on a four year randomized placebo controlled trial in post menopausal women given supplemental calcium and vitamin D. The study concluded that those women given the supplements had a substantial reduction in all cancer risk.

Source: ForYourHealth News

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