Nutrition & Diet Billion-Dollar Scam In a Bottle: Why Vitamins Could Be Useless—or Even Shorten Your Lifespan

[Amy SF]

AlterNet / By Lynn Stuart Parramore
Billion-Dollar Scam In a Bottle: Why Vitamins Could Be Useless—or Even Shorten Your Lifespan
The latest advice from the medical community? Don't take your vitamins.

If you're like roughly half of your fellow Americans, you probably popped a multi this morning. As the slightly acrid taste lingered on your tongue, you felt good knowing that something so quick and easy would help safeguard your health.

Multivitamins are the most popular dietary supplement on Earth. But here’s the sobering reality: They may be simply useless—or worse.

For the last several years, a Mount Fuji of evidence has piled up to show that multivitamins don’t do much of anything for the health of the average person. Though less conclusive, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may even shorten your life. Unless you are taking vitamins to address a specific deficiency, malnutrition or illness, gulping down a multivitamin in hopes of preventing disease or cheating the Grim Reaper may be one of the most prevalent medical myths of our time.

Entire article here.

This article made me think.

 

[Blobbenstein]

We’re not keeling over from scurvy or rickets. In fact, those among us who take multivitamins and other vitamin supplements are actually the least likely to need them. Vitamin users tend to have higher levels of education, smoke less, exercise more, and choose healthier foods than non-users.

So some people who take vitamins don't need to, they are the least likely? Then who is the most likely to need vitamins in society? They are needed then? Perhaps by people who don't choose the healthier foods?

And because the supplement industry is poorly regulated this debunks the idea of needing supplements?


It also mentioned that you shouldn't take more than 100% RDA of B12.

Didn't say much about the dangers of vitamins.

Older women who took multivitamins were 6 percent more likely to die than others.

This isn't a proper trial, so these women were choosing to take them for any number of reasons. Correlation doesn't prove causation, and 6% isn't very large.

Still, I'm sure it's all a bit dodgy, and mythy, and lots of people making lots of money off it all.

 

[Envy]

It's like they never heard of a thing called "absorption rate".