Comments on: Another Negative Study of Vitamins

By: Raw Milk: Got Diarrhea?

Raw Milk: Got Diarrhea? — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:33:03 +0000

[...] the immune boosting and weight loss powers of the acai berry, to the cancer protective effects of vitamins, nutrition pseudoscience is all the rage. While raw milk will never have quite the celebrity cache [...]

By: Vitamins and cancer - and other ailments « Anax blog

Vitamins and cancer - and other ailments « Anax blog — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:22:03 +0000

[...] March 17, 2009 · No Comments On vitamins and cancer: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/588300 and http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=285 and another one http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=372 [...]

By: Kwik, Kwak & krak « Ars GeriatriCare

Kwik, Kwak & krak « Ars GeriatriCare — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:24:08 +0000

[...] zijn ‘onderzoek’ naar duiven natuurlijk…). Zomaar vitamine preparaten slikken? Nutteloos! Sonja Bakker? muhahaha! HIV veroorzaakt echt AIDS, maar kwak zegt nee!

By: DancingSamurai.ca | CAM definition creep…

DancingSamurai.ca | CAM definition creep… — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:53:17 +0000

[...] why are they labelled as CAM? Fibre, similar to other often CAM-labelled therapies like vitamins,

By: DancingSamurai.ca | Misc Updates

DancingSamurai.ca | Misc Updates — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:33:16 +0000

[...] Vitamins? Apparently pretty useless unless for a specific indication. [...]

By: Calli Arcale

Calli Arcale — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:21:41 +0000

upnorth: a lot of the woo relating to pregnancy and conception revolves around the fact that it is very difficult to ethically study this stuff in humans, and so most researchers won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. There’s woo, and there’s also quite a bit of cargo-cult science and old wives’ tales that are relied upon in the absence of anything more substantive. Combine that with the fact that nobody in the world wants to risk making things worse for a developing baby and you get quite reasonable, evidence-based folks recommending things on little more than a hunch. I mean, more vitamins aren’t gonna *hurt*, so why not?

There are a few vitamins that are absolutely vital to pregnancy, and which really are a bit difficult to get. Folic acid is the most famous; deficiencies that cause no problems for the mother can result in severe neural tube defects in the child. Spina bifida, for instance. There was a vigorous campaign to stamp out spina bifida years ago. The two big things that came out of it were: 1) a recommendation that pregnant women take lots of folate supplements during the earliest part of the pregnancy (when the neural tube is forming), and 2) routine fortification of grains with folic acid.

Do you get enough nutrients in your diet to sustain a baby as well as yourself? Probably. But given how delicate the early parts of a pregnancy are, it seems wise to recommend supplementation anyway, just in case. So far, unforseen consequences haven’t reared their ugly head. But I don’t think routine supplementation makes much sense in any other situation, unless the person has some sort of a known deficiency. And vitamins can actually be harmful in excess.

By: Sensible science reporting? Good lord… « The Life And Times Of Cannonball Jones

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:30:39 +0000

[...] food or doing anything ill-advised like banning carbs from your table and also does NOT involve megadoses of vitamins which are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Just a normal balanced diet and a decent [...]

By: ANH undermine public health care efforts « gimpy’s blog

ANH undermine public health care efforts « gimpy’s blog — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:33:58 +0000

[...] to point 7, there is continuing evidence that supplements are not necessary in healthy individuals, as this recent post from Science Based Medicine makes clear, and in fact a recent Cochrane review suggests that at least some forms of supplementation may [...]

By: pmoran

pmoran — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:48:44 +0000

David Emerson’s story is interesting, but typical of the testimonial upon which”alternative” cancer methods rely there is a lot of irrelevant material and critical lack of detail where it matters. We learn, in a third party account by a journalist, how awful the doctors were, and in even more exhaustive detail about the difficulties of getting Burzynski’s outrageously expensive and still highly dubious treatment paid for by other people.

Yet there is an absence of detail where it matters for the question as to what was responsible for the favourable outcome. We are expected to infer that there was uncontrollable cancer without any evidence being supplied that this was the case or that any of the treatments claimed affected the indicators of active disease that were being employed.

It’s not good enough for such important questions. His may be a remarkable case, but we cannot tell from the supplied material.

By: upnorth

upnorth — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:56:53 +0000

Do prenatal vitamins count as “targeted supplementation?” I’m highly skeptical of supplements in general, but the nurse practitioner I see suggested taking prenatals while trying to concieve. I have a healthy, very balanced diet… jeez, do I really need this stuff? I find that the level of woo surrounding conception and pregnancy is outrageous.

By: DavidEmerson

DavidEmerson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:19:03 +0000

The study that you refer to is hardly “evidenced-based.”

http://beating-myeloma.org/article/therapies/womens-multivitamin-study-seriously-flawed-as-usual

As a 15 year survivor of multiple myeloma, the last 10 in complete remission without any conventional therapies whatsoever, it is clear to me that daily supplementation of vitamins, antioxidants, etc is helping me remain cancer free.

http://beating-myeloma.org/about/david-emerson-story

Antioxidants during therapy will help many survivors undergoing therapy-

http://beating-myeloma.org/search/node/antioxidants+during+chemo

David Emerson
http://beating-myeloma.org/

By: Fifi

Fifi — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 02:00:41 +0000

My great grandmother and great great aunts all lived until their mid to late 90s, I’m not sure why people assume that everyone used to die young a couple of generations ago. Sure you could get killed during childhood and over the course of your life by various diseases we can now cure but if they didn’t kill you there was no reason good genes and moderation couldn’t carry you into a ripe old age.

By: CarolynS

CarolynS — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:41:36 +0000

Regarading Pollan, his recommendations are certainly pretty conventional and unlikely to be harmful, but that of course doesn’t mean they are correct or that they do any good or that anyone really has much evidence one way or the other. Of course your great-grandparents had much lower life expectancies anyway and probably higher rates of cardiovascular disease than people today. Do “prepared foods” have some specific harmful ingredient or ingredients? Are there any actual data? Or just kind of the usual set of prejudices about the evils of modern life and McDonalds? I am not saying his recommendations are wrong. I am just saying that they aren’t supported by evidence, and that maybe the same evidentiary standards should be applied, or at least there should be some acknowledgment that the evidence is weak or lacking and these are more “precautionary” recommendations than evidence-based recommendations.

I am also trying to say that the whole “lifestyle” set of beliefs comes pretty close to verging on the same problems as CAM beliefs and in fact may encourage CAM-type beliefs. Even though you think the “lifestyle” beliefs are benign and the CAM beliefs are less so, they both deserve to be treated critically, not just accepted uncritically.

By: tmac57

tmac57 — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:02:25 +0000

SDR ,
Actually I would have to leave it to Pollan to justify his arguments, I read his book about 2 months ago and do not have a copy to refer to. I think that the processed foods (added sugars,highly refined grains etc.) are being implicated in type 2 diabetes and colon cancer. By “food that your great grand parents would recognize”, he is not talking about anything new, but that today we eat a lot of prepared foods from restaurants and grocery stores that contain too much and the worst kind of fats, sugars, too much highly refined grains,foods fried in hydrogenated oils,and so on. He would recommend eating more vegetables, whole grains,fruits and small portions of meat .Nothing fancy or unique about it,just basic nutrition.
If you read the book it would be a lot clearer, I can’t do justice to it here, but I thought it made a lot of common sense.

By: SDR

SDR — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:34:48 +0000

tmac57, criticizing “processed” foods is not helping your argument. There is nothing my nature about “processed” (a word with no real distinct definition when talking about food) food that by nature makes it any less healthy than any other. Some is, some processed food is actually very “healthy” (another vague term). Food is food. It’s just as ridiculous so think that out great grand parents food was any better than ours. We are, despite any problems with out food such as a lot of fried things, still much healthier altogether than they ever were. I just don’t understand what you’re attempting to argue here.

By: tmac57

tmac57 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:47:06 +0000

CarolynS,
Pollan gives detailed explanations in his book about each of his recommendations . Those were just the points he boiled them down to . Briefly by “food”, he means eating foods that your great great grand parents might recognize. Not the highly processed crap like Pop Tarts or Captain Crunch etc. He thinks food fads like oat bran and Omega 3’s and anti-oxidants are wrong headed trends, and that eating a wide variety on fruits, vegetables and smaller amounts of meat are a good general guideline.

By: CarolynS

CarolynS — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:19:23 +0000

Michael Pollan’s prescription sounds plausible but also has never been tested, plus is rather hard to define. Most people believe that what they are eating is “food” after all!

It’s probably prudent to eat a variety of foods and to avoid diets that are too extreme. Other than that, a lot of the stuff about “lifestyle” really verges on woo anyway. “Lifestyle” gets treated as a cheap effective solution to health, disease, cancer, obesity, you name it, despite almost no real evidence and few interventions. Yes, lifestyle interventions reduced the risk of progrression to frank diabetes over 3 years in a subset of people who already had impaired glucose tolerance. But lifestyle didn’t eliminate diabetes in this group! The effects of a healthy diet and exercise are probably good but they should not be exaggerated. I think that some of the beliefs about lifestyle are just as evidence-free as some of the beliefs about other CAM-type modalities. And they encourage the idea that conventional medicine is unnecessary or excessive.

By: The Blind Watchmaker

The Blind Watchmaker — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:32:54 +0000

When I see new patients, we tell them to bring in all of their medication bottles in a bag. When I go through the bottles, there are usually 2 or 3 (sometimes many more) large bottles of vitamins.

They hem and haw about how much their blood pressure pills cost, but have spent small fortunes at GMC on vitamins.

When I suggest that they are not all required (with some exceptions, as Dr. Novella described), they act a bit shocked. “Well which ones should I be taking?”, they ask.

I reply, “Three meals a day, don’t skip breakfast. Get fruits and veges with each meal. Try to get whole grains and other complex carbohydrates. Get your fats from non-animal sources (oils from vegetables, fish and legumes). Use low fat milk or other healthy sources of calcium and vitamin D. Avoid fried foods. Minimize processed carbs like sugars, soda, and white bread. And…..get 2 1/2 hours of exercise a week.”

“But Doc, what about CoQ-10?”

Dohhhhh!

By: SDR

SDR — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:59:06 +0000

tmac57, you have a good point in general, but the claim that people with western diets have health problems non-existent in cultures who eat either primarily animal protein or vegan diets does not necessarily mean that those diets are more healthy. Just as we have health problems those people don’t have, they also have health problems that we don’t have. This doesn’t necessarily follow that their diets are therefore overall healthier than ours.

By: tmac57

tmac57 — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:39:38 +0000

Michael Pollan says in his book ‘In Defense of Food’ that there are cultures of people that eat diets that range from almost exclusively animal protein to vegan, and thrive well on them , while we eating what he calls the “western” diet have many health problems and diseases that are nearly non-existent in those cultures. It seems like a fixation of food as “medicine” type of mentality that drives the various diet fads in the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of good science behind it. His advice: Eat food . Not too much. Mostly plants. But who knows? Maybe he’s wrong too.