by Tony Isaacs

Created on: April 19, 2008

Despite the latest headlines, do not stop taking your vitamins!

A "new" study condemning the use of vitamins as ineffective and potentially dangerous is generating headlines throughout the mainstream media in the United States and Europe. Apparently generating headlines was the sole intention, as the study is neither new, scientific nor objective.

The "study" was led by Serbian scientist and "visiting researcher" at Copenhagen University Hospital, Goran Bjelakovic, whose name is now synonymous with vitamin meta-analyses (studies of other studies) which appear to show that vitamin supplements either dont work or end up increasing your risk of death. Two similar Bjelakovic "studies" on vitamin supplements, in October 2004 and February 2007, resulted in similar outbursts of negative international headlines.

Upon closer examination, the flaws in the so-called study are apparent. First of all, in evaluating studies for inclusion, the authors omitted a massive 405 potentially eligible studies because there were no deaths in the studies and another 69 studies were excluded because they werent randomized controlled trials.

In other words, instead of conducting an honest review of all the studies, the authors arbitrarily eliminated all studies in which vitamins prevented mortality and kept people alive - leaving only the studies in which people died from various causes. Most of the trials used pertain to already sick people being given very high dose, synthetic, isolated nutrients for relatively short periods they therefore have no relevance to the vast majority of vitamin consumers.

When you select or reject studies on criteria that only mean something to statisticians, and ignore important things like duration, how long the study ran for which ranged from 28 days to 14 years your findings are immediately meaningless. Even the huge difference in dose of supplements between different studies was not deemed important - for example, Vitamin E ranging from 10 to 5000 units daily.

The studies in the latest meta-analysis not only relied on synthetic forms of vitamins, in most instances they relied on very high dosages of pharmaceutical-grade, synthetic forms of supplements manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. The dosages used are typically much greater than those recommended on the labels of food or dietary supplement products. In most countries, the dosages used in the trials would be considered medicinal by regulatory authorities and therefore would not legally be allowed

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