Pardon the sensationalistic headline, but I am making a point of how the old formula of “playing the fear card” is still considered effective by mass media, in politics as well as something as basic as food and nutrition. I just watched an MSNBC video from The Today Show titled “The Truth About Supplements.”
The title of the segment itself is crafted to create doubt, and the related link that runs across the bottom of the screen is even more explicit: “5 Truths, Lies about the Vitamins in Your Life.” The guest on the segment is Dr. David Katz, a celebrity physician and a Yale physician who reiterates a Reader’s Digest article (the “related link” above), that basically says you’re wasting your money on vitamins and that they may even be dangerous. I can’t imagine what Katz is reading beyond Reader’s Digest, but every day I read scientific studies that come to an opposite conclusion.
Katz claims that it is a “myth” that vitamins can protect against heart disease or cancer. I haven’t seen a lot in the scientific literature about multiple vitamins being studied for prevention of these common killers, but I just came across one today in Medical News Today from the American Association for Cancer Research, about a study on vitamins and calcium supplementation reported on at the organization’s annual conference. Jaime Matta, Ph.D., a professor in the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, said about the study, “It is not an immediate effect. You don't take a vitamin today and your breast cancer risk is reduced tomorrow. However, we did see a long-term effect in terms of breast cancer reduction.”
Then there is the study I referred to in my last blog about omega-3s reducing breast cancer risk by 25 per cent.
To be fair, Katz does say in the end of the interview not to “throw out the baby with the bath water.” He correctly says that we’re all deficient in vitamin D, recommends a minimum of 1,000IU, and that more and more he is recommending krill oil to his patients.
So he’s not against supplementation, as it were, only taking multivitamins … unless they are whole-food vitamins. Makes me wonder if he has a thriving business on the side selling whole-food supplements.
Why is there any question about Multi-vitamins? It's been a staple for a vey long time. I think you're right: paople have agendas and that colors their thinking and writing. I do believe that if you eat properly you don't need them True? But most people don't.
ReplyDeleteVery few of us eat right, and even if we do the nutrient content of our food has diminished dramatically over the past few decades due to our agribusiness practices (not to mention the use of pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds). So supplementation becomes a way to ameliorate this situation.
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