Articles about Vitamins

Vitamin E scare study used synthetic, not natural vitamin E

Headlines are once again ablaze with the shocking news that taking vitamin E will kill you. Once again, the entire study was based on people taking synthetic vitamin E, which has the opposite molecular structure of natural vitamin E (the kind of vitamin E found in nuts, seeds and other foods). Natural vitamin E is well known to prevent heart attacks and enhance cardiovascular disease, and there exists an abudance of clinical evidence to support that notion.

Highlighting the dangers of synthetic vitamins is a favorite scare tactic of the conventional medical community. By scaring consumers away from vitamin E, they can convince people to take high-profit pharmaceuticals instead of more affordable nutritional supplements. And while nutritional supplements like ephedra get banned for being associated with a few dozen overdose deaths, blockbuster prescription drugs like Vioxx, which are suspected of contributing to more than 27,000 heart attacks, remain perfectly legal and FDA-approved.

There's little hope that the trend will reverse, either. Modern medical researchers continue to look at isolated nutrients like vitamin E or lycopene rather than whole foods like nuts or tomatoes. As a result, they don't get an accurate picture of how these whole foods provide a full-spectrum healing effect on the human body that fights chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease.

These sort of studies on isolated synthethic vitamins aren't honest science. In fact, they're distortions that seem to be designed to discredit all nutritional supplements. True health comes from eating whole foods, superfoods and foods with high nutrient density, including foods with plenty of vitamin E. It also comes from taking nutritional supplements in their natural food forms, not as synthetic chemicals.

Overview:

High doses of Vitamin E, which millions of people take to protect themselves against heart attacks, Alzheimer's disease and other ailments, appear to actually increase the overall risk of dying, researchers reported yesterday.

A new analysis of data from 19 studies involving nearly 136,000 people concluded that the overall risk of dying began to increase at the dose in a typical single capsule of Vitamin E, and that the more Vitamin E people took, the more their risk of death rose.

Someone taking 400 international units of Vitamin E a day for five years, for example, would face a 5 percent higher risk of dying, the researchers found.

A typical multivitamin contains 30 to 60 international units of Vitamin E.

Although the study did not examine how high-dose Vitamin E might increase the risk of death, other studies have suggested that the substance may boost the danger of heart attacks and strokes, perhaps by affecting blood clotting or blocking the beneficial effects of other nutrients, the researchers said.

Whatever the mechanism, the findings indicate that no one should take high doses regularly and that current guidelines for what is considered a safe maximum daily intake should be lowered, the researchers said in a study presented at an American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans.

"A lot of people take vitamins because they believe it will benefit their health in the long term and prolong life," said Edgar R. Miller III, an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the research.

In 2003, Americans spent $ 710 million on Vitamin E, making it the second most popular individual vitamin, behind Vitamin C, according to the Nutrition Business Journal, which tracks industry trends.

But when researchers have attempted to give antioxidants to prevent disease, the results largely have been disappointing, and sometimes alarming.
Beta carotene, for example, was found to increase rather than decrease the risk of lung cancer.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39261-2004Nov10.html