My love affair with vitamins and supplements is over: With a few exceptions -- stay tuned -- I'm tossing them out.
Things started going south for this romance 13 years ago when a Finnish study of 29,000 male smokers showed a higher rate of lung cancer in men who took beta-carotene and vitamin E and, more shockingly, found that those who took beta-carotene had an 8 percent higher risk of death from all causes. Two years later, an American study reported similar findings for beta-carotene.
I've never been a smoker, but a red flag is a red flag. Out went the beta-carotene.
Then came the bad news on vitamin E, for which I had had high hopes as a general disease-preventer. A 2004 analysis by Dr. Edgar R. Miller, of Johns Hopkins University, found an increase in deaths from all causes in people taking more than 400 International Units a day of vitamin E. In 2005, the Women's Health Study of nearly 40,000 healthy women showed 600 international units of vitamin E taken every other day provided no overall benefit for heart disease or cancer.
Out went the vitamin E.
Along the way, I tossed my echinacea, which I once swore by for preventing or shortening the duration of colds. (Never underestimate the placebo effect!) Though proponents still contend the studies are flawed, I now believe the debunkers -- among them the researchers who published a major study in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that echinacea has no effect on colds.
Did I mention vitamin C? Oh, how I wanted to believe this famous antioxidant would keep me from getting cancer and all those colds! But despite numerous studies, "we haven't been able to show a benefit," Miller said.
The latest disillusionment came in February with a Danish study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. When the researchers pooled the data from 47 reasonably unbiased studies involving 180,938 people, they found a 7 percent increased risk of death from all causes in those taking beta-carotene, a 16 percent increased risk of death in those taking vitamin A, and a 4 percent increased risk of death in those taking vitamin E.
Jeffrey Blumberg , a nutritionist and director of the antioxidants laboratory at Tufts University, among others, said that this study was based on flawed methodology, including the fact that the researchers left out of their analysis a number of studies that might have tipped the results in a different direction. But, to me, that's clearly not a strong endorsement of vitamins.
