Vitamins Good, Bad, or No Effect

As a researcher, I always go crazy when the news media picks up on some bit of research and runs with it, without really looking at whether the study is valid or not. A prime example is the Women's Multiple Vitamin study. I was some what surprised to see that this was actually published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Of course what the media picked up on was that the study "showed" that multivitamins are useless against cancer and heart disease in women.

Now, let's take a look at the study. This was actually a survey, which means that the results are only as good as the questions asked of the participants and the truth of the answers. What am I talking about here. If you really want to know if vitamins work, then you need to design a study in which you actually give the participants vitamins. This published study did not give anyone vitamins, merely asked the question, "do you take a multivitamin?" Most people would answer this question yes. But if you go look and count how many times a week they actually take the vitamin, it will likely not be every day. Now I know there are us out there who would rather not eat than to miss our vitamins, I'm one of those, but this is not the average person out there. The other question you have to ask is what kind of vitamins were they taking. Was it the cheapest brand they could get? Was there any quality control behind the vitamin they were taking to say that they were actually getting what it said they were getting in that vitamin. Oh, and here's another thing, were the components in the vitamin actually able to be absorbed by the body.

The interesting thing about all of this is that here is a "study" that says vitamins have no effect towards cancer and heart disease. The conclusion is that if vitamins don't have an effect, then you must need to take the expensive, toxic medications of big pharma. Well, I for one am not buying this one. Until they can put together a decent study, this does not show me anything and there are far more studies that do show the effects of vitamins.