DEATH BY VITAMINS!!! AS one of the fifth of the population using complementary medicine, I should surely be worried by the apparently sound scientific review purporting to show that vitamin supplements are a waste of time and could even shorten life. Somehow I can’t get my knickers in a twist about this latest revelation. Exposés of the dangers lurking in the healthfood shop and on the complementary medicine shelves at Boots come round more regularly than Christmas.
Oh, how the most narrow-minded conventional medics love to hammer anyone or anything that suggests that not every solution to every medical condition is to be found in pharmaceutical-based allopathic medicine. You’d think they’d be delighted that people like me take an active rather than a passive “Cure me doc, I’m sick” attitude towards their health.
Instead of clogging up their surgeries, we take to bed with a hot toddy and vitamin C, echinacea, and zinc. Surely to be encouraged? But while the more enlightened orthodox medics can see that some tried and tested complementary remedies can play a role in healing, many more are threatened by alternative approaches, even the humble vitamin, and relish any opportunity to bash them.
advertisement
Let’s get the risks in proportion here. It’s pretty hard, well-nigh impossible even, to commit suicide in a healthfood shop. Even supposing I went in there and binged on every multivitamin and herb I could lay my hands on - supposing I could actually swallow enough of these daunting, horse-sized capsules in the first place - the worst outcome would be projectile vomiting. Yet I never fail to be amazed how the knockers of complementary medicine seem inured to the not inconsiderable risks attached to pharmaceutical drugs.
The thinktank Compass recently quantified these. Latest annual figures showed 1,040,000 people in the UK admitted to hospital because of side- effects of prescription drugs, a staggering 6.5% of all admissions. Adverse reactions cost the the country £2 billion a year: that’s enough to eliminate MRSA from all our hospitals.
What sort of piffling reactions are we talking about? Certain conventional anti-depressants, for instance, leave some young people suicidal when they were only moderately depressed to start with. Whereas good old St John’s Wort, now a fairly mainstream herb dispensed in Germany, perks you up better, at no risk, unless you mix it with conventional drugs. And why should all those surprisingly supple senior citizens who find supplements such as MSM and glucosamine palpably effective in warding off creaky joints use conventional anti-arthitis medicine instead, after all the fuss over Vioxx, the arthritis painkiller now established to have caused heart attacks?
This week’s anti-vitamin headlines are based on a review by one particular group of researchers, effectively a rehash of their paper published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Faced with a substantial number of studies reporting positive results for antioxidant vitamins, they first excluded more than 400 trials that had no deaths, then decided which trials they liked (those with a low risk bias) and did not like (those with a high risk bias).
According to one leading expert in this field, Dr Balz Frei, it is “a flawed analysis of flawed data, and it does little to help us understand the real health effects of antioxidants, whether beneficial or otherwise”. (For a detailed critique of the methodology of this study see www.patrickholford.com, “How antioxidant researchers cooked the books”.) Yes, yes, I know, the comforting wisdom doled out by government health gurus is that we don’t need supplements if we eat well. That might be persuasive, were it not that the concept of recommended daily amounts (RDAs) for vitamins and minerals was devised during the second world war to prevent deficiency diseases such as scurvy. RDAs are not to be confused with an optimum intake, which could be significantly higher. And can we lay to rest the stereotype, put about by mainstream health authorities, that consumers of supplements use them as a substitute for a healthy diet? In my experience, it’s precisely the dedicated healthy eaters who also take supplements.
Bear in mind that nitrogenous fertilisers and intensive food production methods have reduced vitamin and micronutrient levels in the food we eat. Our apples aren’t as nutritious as they were in the 1950s, say. It is undisputed, for example, that British soil has insufficient levels of selenium, the immune system booster, to promote health. Also, environmental pollution now exposes us to many more toxins than humans encountered even half a century ago, so it’s a thought worth considering that we might need higher levels of antioxidants to fight them than our diets can provide.
Rather than rubbishing supplements, medics with an enlightened, open attitude to promoting public health should accept that complementary medicine is here to stay, and encourage research that helps us understand better how it can work. Yet they experience a collective acute adverse reaction, even to users of vitamin C. That’s their hang-up and they need to get over it.
Tags: adverse reactions, allopathic medicine, complementary medicine, complementary remedies, echinacea, healthfood shop, hot toddy, knickers, knockers, medical condition, medics, multivitamin, pharmaceutical drugs, prescription drugs, projectile vomiting, surgeries, vitamin c, vitamin supplements, waste of time, zinc