Multivitamin use will NOT cut your life short, so please ignore this ridiculous study

It’s like they’re trying to kill us

The only thing worse than bad medical research is bad medical research that won’t die.

Unfortunately, a 2011 study on multivitamins is like the zombie of useless medical studies.

A recent Forbes article dug up the study to support the insane idea that multivitamins and other vitamin supplements are dangerous.

Let me get my shovel and bash this zombie study in the head once and for all. Because if you fall for this flawed report, you’ll be putting yourself at serious risk.

One must admit…

Researchers asked nearly 39,000 older women about their supplement intake and followed their health records for more than 20 years. Results showed a razor-thin link between death during the study period and multivitamin intake.

And as the Forbes article notes, “Death, one must admit, is a pretty bad outcome.”

That’s cute. But multivitamins didn’t take those women’s lives.

Consumer Reports explains the first issue: “It was an observational study, not clinical trial, so it’s possible that other factors contributed to the results.”

Possible? More like absolute certainty!

Here’s the thing… To get anywhere near a true test of a supplement, the study has to be placebo controlled. And every time multis are tested in placebo controlled trials, the results are uniformly positive.

This past summer I told you about a placebo controlled multi trial. Men over the age of 50 who began taking a multivitamin reported significant reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression. They also felt more energetic.

And in another large placebo controlled study from last year, multivitamin use for more than a decade was linked to an 8 percent reduction of cancer risk, with no side effects. Eight percent is not an earth-shaking result, but it’s the opposite of risking death.

Many of the women in the junk study from 2011 were in their 80s by the end of the study period. So there are all kinds of factors that could have contributed to their deaths.

For instance, supplement users were twice as likely to also use hormone replacement therapy, which is linked to breast cancer and heart disease.

But Forbes didn’t bother to mention any of that.

Forbes also didn’t mention another interesting finding of this study… Supplements of calcium, magnesium, vitamins C, D, E, and B-complex were all linked to a LOWER mortality risk over two decades.

Lower mortality, one must admit, is a pretty good outcome.

Sources:
“The Top 5 Vitamins You Should Not Take” Steven Salzberg, Forbes, 10/7/13, forbes.com

“Dietary Supplements and Mortality Rate in Older Women” Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 171, No. 18, 10/10/11, archinte.ama-assn.org

“Supplements linked with death in older women” Consumer Reports, 10/11/11, news.consumerreports.org