Dietary Supplements

You may have heard that you should take folic acid to prevent heart disease.

Why? Because folic acid reduces homocysteine levels in the blood and high homocysteine levels have been associated with heart disease.

Cool idea and, up until recently, a lot of folks bought into this recommendation.

Well, it turns out it probably isn’t true.

Some researchers from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine did a “meta-analysis” of 12 clinical trials involving 52,000 participants and found that folic acid does NOT reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease or all-cause mortality.

Whoops!

You wonder how much money has been spent on folic acid in the hopes of receiving some health benefit.

Instead, the authors of the study suggest people’s time and money should be focused elsewhere:

“It is important to focus on strategies of proven benefit in the prevention of cardiovascular disease, including smoking cessation, lipid reduction, treatment of hypertenion and diabetes, and maintenance of a healthy weight and physical activity.”

Bravo!

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of Finally, the Straight Scoop About Weight, Nutrition, and Fitness

For years diabetics have been told to take extra vitamin E to gain the benefits of its antioxidant properties.

As a result, worldwide vitamin E supplement sales are enormous.

I first remember reading about the incredible health benefits of vitamin E back in the 60s. Several popular health books were published which promoted this “magical” substance.

Since then there have been a few epidemiological studies suggesting these nutritionists were right. However, such studies can’t fully address biases due to selection of the study population, measurement error of deitary vitamin E intake and other residual confounding errors.

Therefore, what has been needed is a well-designed and well-conducted randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, conducted over a long period of time, that would avoid all these biases.

Well, such a trial has been completed.

Researchers studied almost 40,000 U.S. women over a 10 year period. About half the group received 600 IU of vitamin E every other day and the other half received a placebo.

During the ten-year follow-up, there were 827 cases of diabetes in the vitamin E group and 869 in the placebo group. In other words — statistically — there were no differences between the two groups.

Here is the conclusion of the study as stated by the researchers:

“In this large trial with 10-year follow-up, alternate-day does of 600IU of vitamin E provided NO significant benefit for type 2 diabetes in initially healthy women.”

This is just one recent study of many showing that taking a vitamin E supplement provides NO health benefit. In fact, a couple of recent studies have demonstrated a negative health impact (increased mortality) from taking vitamin E.

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of Finally, the Straight Scoop About Weight, Nutrition, and Fitness

There was a great article published back in December that I just found in my file. Somehow I misplaced it and I shouldn’t have because it makes a great point.

Have you noticed how almost everything we eat is fortified with extra vitamins? There are cereals that provide 100% of your daily requirement and power bars that provide another 50%. Bread has been fortified with vitamins for a long time but, now, even orange juice and bottled water have extra vitamins added.

The article makes this point and then says, “Before you know it, you’ve dosed yourself with five, six, maybe 10 times the recommended allowance for the day’s nutrients.”

So, should you take a daily vitamin for insurance — or, could that cause an overdose?

Actually no one knows. The advice in the article — “if you don’t take multivitamins, there’s no reason to start. If you do, there’s no evidence to stop.”

Pretty definitive, huh?

That’s the problem with nutrition — no one really knows what you should do or should not do. There just hasn’t been valid studies done that prove one thing or another — and there probably never will be. It’s just too difficult to do a good study that deals with what people eat. It’s impossible to track everything subjects put in their mouths and survey data is notoriously inaccurate.

But the studies get funded none-the-less and then get reported by the media — but the studies are all so contradictory we all just get more and more confused.

For example, although nutritionists have told us for years to take extra vitamin E, a study in 2005 with 40,000 women found the vitamin had no effect.

Or what about taking the B vitamins to lower the risk of heart attack? Again, recent studies have shown it doesn’t work.

In fact a large NIH study examined ALL the evidence available through clinical trials and could only find three well-established benefits from taking vitamins:
* Folic acid protects against neural tube disorders in developing fetuses (but a pregnant women only needs to take as much folic acid as what is contained in most multivitamins).
* Calcium with vitamin D helps prevent bone fractures (you can get plenty of each by drinking some milk and getting some sunshine).
* Vitamins C, E and zinc reduces eyesight deterioration from age-related macular degneration.

But, what about the other side of the equation. What is the negative health effect of overdosing on vitamins? Again, no one knows — but the doctors quoted in this article all said this was a potential concern.

Bottom line, it probably is OK to take a basic multivitamin. But, taking megadoses of anything is likely a mistake.

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of Finally, the Straight Scoop About Weight, Nutrition, and Fitness

A Danish-led study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that vitamin supplements may cause more harm than good.

For as long as I can remember, nutritionists have told us to increase our intake of the major antioxidants — beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin C and selenium.

The theory was that these antioxidants would help eliminate “free radicals” that are thought to cause all sorts of problems in our bodies.

Vitamin companies adopted this theory years ago and used it to heavily market their products as substances that would improve health, guard against diseases such as cancer and heart disease, and slow down the aging process.

Well, this was a nice theory and it made all kinds of sense — but the actual research on real people demonstrates it probably isn’t valid.

In fact, it seems like just the opposite is true — through some mechanism these products actually increase mortality levels.

The authors of this 2007 paper reviewed 815 clinical trials (all studies prior to October 2005 testing the health outcomes from taking these vitamins) and sifted through the data to identify those studies having the least amount of bias.

When they reviewed this subset of data they discovered the following:

* Taking vitamin A increased death risk by 16%
* Taking beta carotene increased death risk by 7%
* Taking vitamin E increased death risk by 4%
* Taking vitamin C increased death risk by 6% (with less clear results)

Only taking selenium showed a decreased death risk but this decrease was not shown to be statistically significant (meaning, the death risk difference could have happened by chance).

The overall conclusion of the study was that on balance, the best quality research shows that beta caroten, vitamin A and vitamin E may increase mortality risk, but vitamin C and selenium need further study.

Yikes! 10 to 20% of the US population take dietary supplements (beyond just a multivitamin which is taken by about half the population). This seems like a bit of a problem to me!

Allen Oelschlaeger
Author of Finally, the Straight Scoop About Weight, Nutrition, and Fitness