Did you hear the breaking news yesterday—that multivitamins may shorten your life? With junk science from the AMA’s Archives of Internal Medicine and biased, invested interests, Conventional Medicine is trying to clear out the competition. This ridiculous “study” would be totally ignored if it weren’t for the media’s duplicitous and exaggerated headlines.
 
Vitamins may increase women’s risk of dying. MyHealthNewsDaily, October 11, 2011
Dietary supplements risky for older women. Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2011
Vitamin pills and risk of death studied. NHS UK, October 11, 2011
‘Little justification’ for taking vitamin supplements. The Daily Telegraph, October 11, 2011
 
Bloomberg phrased it this way: “Multivitamins and some dietary supplements, used regularly by an estimated 234 million US adults, may do more harm than good, according to a study that tied their use to higher death rates among older women.” The study’s authors outrageously concluded, “We see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements.”
Wait a minute, the total US population is only 312 million. How can there be 234 million US adults taking dietary supplements. The truth is that studies show that 40 percent of Americans take a daily multivitamin and as many as 50 percent (156 million) take vitamins and other dietary supplements according to the US Centers for Disease Control statistics released in April 2011. Two-thirds of women 60 and older take Calcium, up from 28 percent in the early 1990s.
This latests study, published in the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Archives of Internal Medicine, assessed the use of vitamin and mineral supplements in nearly 39,000 women whose average age was 62. The researchers asked the women to fill out three surveys, the first in 1986, the second in 1997, and the last in 2004, reporting what supplements they took and what foods they ate, and answering a few questions about their health.
That’s right, all the data was self-reported by the study subjects only three times over the course of the 19-year-long study. To say the data is “unreliable” would be a generous description. This kind of “data” has no place in a valid scientific study.
Then the researchers looked at how many of the women had died by 2008. They reported that the number of deaths were somewhat higher for women who took copper, a little bit lower for women who took calcium, but about average for most of the women.
In the study, all of the relative risks were so low as to be statistically insignificant, and none was backed up by any medical investigation or biological plausibility study. No analysis was done on what combinations of vitamins and minerals were actually consumed, and no analysis of the cause of death was done beyond grouping for “cancer,” “cardiovascular disease,” or “other”—there was certainly no causative analysis done. The interactions of potential compounding risk factors is always tremendously complex—and was ignored in this so-called study.
The study data is so flimsy that the media had to make wildly exaggerated claims in order to get anybody to look at the article. Here are the raw facts:
The new study linked a number of individual vitamins and minerals to the slight mortality risk, including multivitamins, vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc and copper.
Over the 19 years of the study, 40.8 percent of the 12,769 women in the study who took a daily multivitamin had died by the end of 2008, whereas 39.8 percent of the 10,161 women who hadn’t taken a daily multivitamin had died. Contrary to the overstated headlines, the truth is that the difference is very slim and could certainly be accounted for by the poor design of the study and the self-reporting that occurred only three times in 19 years. Those numbers do not sound very convincing to me that multivitamins are a threat to anyone’s health.
“Multivitamin” can mean many different things, and of course changed tremendously over the 19 years during which this “study” was conducted. Were they high quality?  Were the ingredients synthetic or natural?  How much of each nutrient was taken? Were they really taken at all? How good is anyone’s memory in describing what took place over many years? One would assume that that the women’s diets fluctuated greatly over the same period; when self-reporting only three times in 19 years, there is a great deal of information one would naturally leave out even if some of it was accurate. No analysis was done of the effect of supplements on the women’s overall health, nor of their effect on women of other ages.
In short, this study is less than useless: it is dangerous, because it is being used by the media and the mainstream medical establishment to blacken the eye of nutritional supplements using poor data, bad analysis, and specious conclusions—otherwise known as junk science.
What’s more the opinions expressed in many of the media reports clearly point to the self serving interests of those who desire to take the control of the supplement industry and deny the public safe and effective alternatives to expensive and harmful drugs.
The study, published today (Oct. 10, 2011) in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, is part of a series examining interventions in medicine that may be unnecessary.
Dr. Goran Bjelakovic and Dr. Christian Gluud, of the Center for Clinical Intervention Research at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark wrote the following in an accompanying commentary.
“We believe that for all micronutrients, risks are associated with insufficient and too-large intake. Low levels of intake increase the risk of deficiency. High levels of intake increase the risk of toxic effects and disease,” they wrote.
“Therefore, we believe that politicians and regulatory authorities should wake up to their responsibility to allow only safe products on the market,” they wrote.

Dr. Hansen’s take on the study

This effort is sponsored by the conventional medical establishment and Big Pharma. It is trying really hard to find some data to discredit Vitamin Supplements because they offer a safe, effective and less costly alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs. For example, see “FDA Wants to Make Supplements Drugs” Posted on July 19, 2011 by Clark Hansen, N.M.D.
The bottom line is this, one negative study cannot overturn tens of thousands of positive studies that show significant health benefits from taking multivitamins.
A 2002 comprehensive review of vitamin and mineral research by a Harvard Medical School team of physicians, concluded that low vitamin intake has been linked to so many illnesses, that everybody-regardless of age or health status- should start taking a daily multivitamin. The researchers reviewed more than 30 years of English-language articles about vitamins and their relationship to chronic diseases from 1966 to 2002. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Fletcher, said, “It’s rare to find a health-promoter that offers such a substantial benefit with a relatively low cost and low risk of problems. And when you have such a thing,” he added, “you ought to jump on it.”
Dr. Fletcher pointed out that most Americans-except those who follow what he described as a “super-perfect” diet-likely do not get enough of certain vitamins in their diets and would benefit from a multivitamin.
Ok, I will acknowledge from the beginning that you can certainly take too much of a very few vitamins and minerals, but you have to try pretty hard to overdose on vitamins or minerals. Vitamin A, for example, can be toxic if you take 50,000 IUs daily for a few months. Exceeding 10,000 I.U.s Vitamin A can cause birth defects, and taking more than 800 IUs of  Vitamin E can thin your blood and suppress your immune system. Niacin, prescribed by many conventional doctors at a dose of 1500mg per day can cause liver damage. Vitamin B6, at more than 500 mg, a dose 10 times the amount I put in my multivitamin can cause peripheral neuropathy. Too much iron can cause increased risk of heart disease and cancer.
We know these things. They are few and rare and only if taken for long periods at unusually high doses. But that is no reason to throw away a good thing. Consumers are intentionally being frightened away from taking helpful supplements for one reason: greed.
The pharmaceutical industry, which controls the propaganda machine to doctors and consumers through medical journals and the general public through TV, radio and magazine advertisements, wants to control its market dominance and will do whatever it takes to cut off the flow of billions of dollars away from drugs to nutritional supplements.
For additional information see Vitamin Supplements vs Drugs, by Dr. Clark Hansen.