Last month the UK’s Guardian newspaper carried a report from twelve prominent doctors in Denmark saying vitamins/antioxidants don’t work. Not only that, they could actually kill you. On the same page of the newspaper carrying the story another doctor was telling us how Vitimin D would cure us of depression, grapefruit reduce the risk of liver cancer, and chrysanthemum alleviated vision, fatigue, insomnia and urinary problems. Needless to say the UK’s Health Food Manufacturers’ Association and a dozen other such bodies were outraged by the Danish report. “No way! Rubbish”, they thundered. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But what and who are we to believe?
The newspapers print anything that looks like news. If medical researchers from Timbuktu with impressive credentials denounce nutritional supplements saying they don’t cure squat, are a waste of money, and can actually be bad for you, then that’s one in the eye for Prince Charles and all those new agey space cadets out there courtesy of yer average meat & potato claret-swilling, pack-a-smokes a day, editorial types. The editor of the health pages, then prints a slew of rebuttals from another posse of docs, who make a living flogging supplements, and for conclusive proof, trots out a list of A-list celebs big on supps.
Adam & Eve on Drugs?
To cap it all, the people who make most of the supplements, earning them billions of dollars, are the same people who spend hundreds of millions on research to prove that they don’t work. Now why would they do a silly thing like that? Of course it’s not silly at all, when you know the major pharmaceutical companies are the people manufacturing most supplements. They know people who want to believe will go on buying supplements. What they don’t want is doctors and the public to know that non-drug nutritionals can not only alleviate certain diseases but actually cure them. Whoa! No way…., only drugs are allowed to do that. If it’s actually shown nutritional substances can cure anything, then by definition it is NOT a nutritional supplement, it’s a drug. In which case it must not only be prescribed like a drug, but must cost like a drug. So just to make it clear, when Adam & Eve chomped down on that apple, they weren’t just acquiring knowledge and keeping the doctor away, they wuz doin’ drugs and in anachronistic contravention of at least a dozen 21st Century patents.
No wonder we get confused. It is in almost everybody’s interest that we don’t know what’s going on. You think health journals, health food stores and online websites are going to tell you the score? Not on your nelly, they’re not. They’ll just keep telling you all the wonderful things all these vitamins, herbs, minerals and God knows what will do for you. What they’ll never tell you, if they ever knew, is what constitutes a therapeutic or preventative dose. Why not? Just look across the page and there’s the answer. Yes, it’s an advertisement for a supplement complex. It contains lots of the ingredients you’ve just read alleviates almost any condition you care to name (and we laugh at the funny English indications on Chinese medicines?). You won’t see the name Roche, or Glaxo or any other major pharmaceutical company listed there, but they’re there alright. They have patents on and supply many of the ingredients. That’s how they were found by the EU and US governments to be guilty of operating a criminal cartel for decades, illegally fixing the price of vitamins and having to pay the largest corporate fine in history.
But then Big Pharma has a lot of money to throw around. They lobby far better than Big Tobacco ever did. They want to make it illegal to sell any nutritional supplement over the counter in anything BUT an ineffective dose. They’ve already succeeded in making it illegal to make any medical claim for supplements even if it’s been around since Old King Cole. So effective is their lobbying that our medical and political establishments have all bought the idea that supplements ought to be controlled, for our own good. First to protect us from the few supplements that could conceivably harm us if we were very stupid or very unlucky; and second, so no unscrupulous supplement manufacturers can cheat us. Yes, I hate to break it to you, there are such people. Have you any idea how many different hundreds of ways there are to off yourself with OTC medicines the drug companies flog us, if you had a mind to? They already killed over 100,000 patients in American hospitals last year with drugs meant for job, not even by mistake. There were no recorded deaths due to supplements in 2007. And, these guys have got our financial best interests at heart? Of course they do! The average drug mark-up over generic cost is around 300,000%. Thanks guys!
Back to the beginning then. The report referred to is from 12 doctors from the Cochrane Review based in Copenhagen. So far as we know this is an independent review of the major antioxidants not funded by pharmaceutical companies. This isn’t always easy to establish, but let’s assume it is so. The review is what is known as a meta analysis. That is to say, they conducted no new research themselves but reviewed all the existing research on the subject, being 815 trials. On the face of it then, if these doctors find that the antioxidants Vitamin A, Beta-Carotene, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and Selenium don’t prolong life but actually increases mortality, we owe it to ourselves to pay attention. But…., when you find they’ve based their conclusions on only 67 trials or 9% of the available evidence, you start to wonder. Why? Reason being, they say, was only 67 trials were conducted according to the research “gold” standard, what they call random double blind trial. So that’s good, isn’t it? Well, not really. The “gold” standard is employed to assess the safety and efficacy of very powerful new drugs that often can and do kill people. They are very rigorous, time-consuming and extremely expensive tests to conduct.
Now here’s the point.
Nobody is going to spend $800,000,000 to prove chrysanthemum leaves are not only safe but can help you sleep and make you pee better. So who then paid for the 67 trials that did include something on antioxidants? One guess. Yes, blow us down with a feather, it’s Big Pharma. Here’s how it goes. I have a wonderful blockbuster statin drug which lowers cholesterol, reduces heart attack and strokes, but could reduce Alzheimer’s and God knows what else. I want to prove it so everyone in the world will start taking my statin preventatively and make me mega godzillions more than I already do. Since I have to invest, why not bung in a couple of those cheap antioxidants people stupidly keep on insisting on taking. Ask the right questions, pick the right sample, administer an ineffective dose and it’s not hard to come up with the right answers.
So where does all this leave us? Exactly where it always has.
Supplements do work. But….most don’t.
Probably about 30% of supps sold out there aren’t any good because the really are no good, the makers are crooks or don’t know what their doing. Another 60% of supplements sold are made honestly but will be a waste of your money because they are not in a therapeutic dosage. That leaves 10% of nutritional formulations that may do the job you want. Most of these are not sold in health shops but via practitioners only. That means you have to find a doctor or practitioner you trust or become an educated consumer yourself. Not easy.
Here’s the short cut. Go to www.lef.org. They offer one of the best ranges of some 300 cutting edge formulations at reasonable cost. They give reliable information about how much to take. Perhaps the most important thing they do is publish disease and prevention protocol listing some 170 treatments for degenerative conditions disease. It’s written for the layman and includes both conventional and alternative treatments. I can think of nowhere else that so much clear and reliable information is made so readily available.
