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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Are your vitamins really killing you?

"Rather than making you healthier, you might be surprised to know that the vitamins you take every day are actually killing you.

This recent story has been running in the media based on a meta-analysis by Goran Bjelakovic published in JAMA 2007.

The problem is that this JAMA article was a flawed hatchet job not worth the paper it was written on. Out of 748 vitamin studies, the researchers selected only 67 focusing on high dose synthetic vitamins, and excluded all the others showing benefit. This called selective sampling...."
"Negative articles on vitamins are seen in the mass media. Usually, these are funded directly or indirectly by drug companies, and the researchers are paid to come up with negative findings in order to discredit vitamins so people will take more drugs. It is a simple matter of follow the money trail."
For the full article by Dr Dach, please go here.
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Gary Moller comments:
Dr Dach is not the first expert to rubbish recent reports that vitamins kill people. What has been predictably disappointing is the fact that huge media fanfare has been given to these flawed, if not fraudulent reports while the reports and voices to the contrary have been largely ignored.

This is in common with the ignoring of the truth about other health lies . Do you hear that keeping out of the sun increases your risk of developing at least 28 different forms of cancer? Do you hear that fat free diets are among the root causes of the obesity epidemic? Do you hear that lowering cholesterol can kill off your sexual performance? Do you hear that calcium fortified low fat milk may be adding to your risk of developing osteoporosis? Do you hear that more runners die from drinking too much water nowadays, then from drinking too little? And so on and so on.

What is common to all of these is big bucks industry benefiting from promoting health myths and compromised health advocacy organisations failing to advocate for the consumer-patient. Health has been hijacked by commercial interests, as has much of our food production and their huge financial muscle has skewed the advice and information that is delivered to the public.


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1 comment:

Jack said...

You don't need a tinfoil hat to figure out that corporate medicine likes to work through shadow entities to push its agenda. Until 1983, the AMA actively conspired to crush the chiropractic profession in the USA and lost three antitrust lawsuits in federal court. See Wilks v. AMA on Wikipedia.

The roots of the obnoxious "quackwatch" site (I don't link to sewage, so no link)grew out of the Wilk case. I won't elaborate more, because saying bad things about it on a blog attracts a small but active (and probably paid) swarm of trolls. But a google of quackwatch tim bolen will tell you all you need to know. I bring it up because the site is frequently quoted in mainstream media as gospel, just like the BS vitamin article you mention.

Keep telling the truth, Gary