Multi vitamin effectiveness
[projekktor id=’10506′]
There’s an old saying ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. But if we’re not getting enough healthy food in our diets many turn to multi-vitamins. Now a couple of new studies suggest we shouldn’t bother.
The vitamin and supplement sector is a multi-billion dollar industry, generating over ten billion dollars in the United States alone last year.
But, in an unusually blunt editorial, Dr. Cynthia Mulrow, a senior deputy editor at the journal says taking multi-vitamins doesn’t seem to ward off thinking and memory problems. Nor will it prevent further heart disease or death among people who have already had a heart attack. In fact, she flatly declares: “stop wasting your money”.
Focussing on two studies printed in the journal, she says there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that popular vitamin supplements probably aren’t doing you a lot of good, and in fact, taking the wrong supplements, or too much of some types, could actually cause harm.
That declaration is backed up by Doctor Diane Birt, a leading nutritionist at Iowa State University who says that unless a doctor has specifically prescribed a multi-vitamin, there is no point in taking it.
But researchers at McMaster University have a different opinion. Doctor Jennifer Lemon and Doctor David Rollo are part of a team including neurologists at the University of California Irvine that have been working on the affects of vitamins in mice for more than 13 years. And while she agrees that large amounts of the wrong vitamins might actually be harmful, her research says that the right balance of the right supplements can have remarkable effects on aging, and heart disease. And she’s not even ready to completely dismiss multi-vitamins, just yet:
Doctors Rollo, Lemon, and their team are on the verge of producing a first generation “designer vitamin” that will be ready for human testing next year. Lemon says preliminary results have been very promising and soon, there may be specifically balanced supplements designed for individual diseases, including cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.
