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Do Vitamins Really Shorten your Life? |
| Posted on Apr 21 2008 at 9:21 PM |
No doubt you are puzzled if you saw the article in the press last week that said taking Vitamins can shorten your life (the article was particularly about antioxidants). I don't blame you for being concerned because, if you are reading this, the chances are that you do take antioxidants and you may be concerned the clock has started ticking a bit quicker!
It is difficult to understand why the major papers decided to publish this but there are some things you need to understand.
1. The report was originally published in 2007 but was discredited. One piece of research was removed this time but otherwise the information was the same as last year but for some reason the Newspaper Editors felt they should publish it.
2. This research was something called a meta analysis. That means there was no new research but the researches went back over lots of research carried out in previous years and pulled them all together to see what the results were like when they added them all together. There was just one problem with the way they did it. Out of 648 studies that could have been re-examined the study authors chose only 67 - and these were studies where people had died. They did not include the other approximately 580 studies so you can see that already there was some bias to their study.
3. The trials that were selected were done with people who already had some risk of dying early such as heart disease so it is inevitable that some people did go on to die - this would have happened whether or not they were taking a vitamin tablet but you can see how you get the statement that some people died whilst taking them. The comment that they died 'early' is made comparing them to people in good health with average life expectancy but these people had illnesses giving them shorter than average life expectancy ... so now you can see how the headline became distorted further to suggest that taking the vitamin somehow caused them to die early.
4. Lastly one point which is important to those of us working in the field of nutrition is that the vitamin tablets given to the people in the trial were synthetic ie made in a laboratory. The vitamins I use are only natural which means they contain many elements that work together and may give greater benefit than an artificial 'copy'.
So - as you can see the average person reading the headlines last week would have been concerned for nothing as the headline was extremely misleading. Why the newspapers felt they had to publish this old and previously discredited information I do not know but at least you know the other side of the story now. Pass the information on. Wouldnt it be sad if someone who really needed the help of therapeutic levels of vitamins stopped taking them just because of this 'news'.
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