‘Press release medicine’ gives headlines, but not the full story

Don’t let this junk science put your health in danger

I don’t know if these New Zealand scientists have been in the sauna too long or what, but this new “study,” if you can call it that, makes absolutely no sense.

So if you heard the perky blonde jabbering about it on the morning shows, or it came up in your newsfeed, you will get a very wrong take on Vitamin D.

And that means you could be a victim of press-release medicine.

You see, in this daily media frenzy to fill 24 hours, they’ll put just about anything on the air. So a press release about a study gets sent to a news station and suddenly the headline the PR expert wrote is officially medical news.

Here’s the crazy part: if someone bothered to read below the headline, they would see this isn’t news. And it certainly isn’t science!

You know as well as I do that the list of vitamin D’s health benefits gets longer all the time. So you can imagine my reaction to hearing that “vitamin D supplements don’t help your health.”

They couldn’t find a real study showing you didn’t need it. So what did they do? They invented one.

Oh, the futility…

First off, this wasn’t even a “study,” you know, where they look at people who are taking the vitamin or drug and see what the outcome is. No, this was called a “futility analysis” (I know, what a name).

To do that “analysis,” the researchers looked at other studies to predict “the potential of a future study.”

So not only are they hitting vitamin D with a sucker punch, they are saying it’s just a waste of time for other researchers to conduct any additional (real) studies.

But the kicker — and what makes this whole thing such a joke — is the other thing those New Zealand researchers said.

After broadcasting the news that taking the vitamin gives little, if any, health benefits, they added this little gem: unless you have a vitamin D deficiency.

Well, guess what? That’s just about everybody.

And it gets even better.

When you dig deeper, you see they are talking out of both sides of their microphones. Because the online news reports that ran the story with plenty of D-bashing, also had some other information about it on their web sites. Information about just how valuable taking vitamin D can be.

Here are a couple gems:

Most doctors will tell you not enough vitamin D can be bad for health. Or, a deficiency can cause “increased risk for death from heart disease, cancer, cognitive impairment in older adults and severe asthma in kids.”

And that wasn’t from some alternative newsletter with 10 subscribers either. That was from the extremely mainstream CBS News.

Other sites that featured the junk science story also had big warnings about being D deficient, saying it’s is common, especially for older people.

If a vitamin D supplement helps D deficiency, it obviously works! But I guess it would be futile to tell that to those “scientists” from New Zealand. Maybe I should send them a press release.

Sources:
“Vitamin D supplements won’t protect against disease in healthy adults, review says” Ryan Jaslow, CBS News, 1/24/2014, cbsnews.com

“Are you getting enough Vitamin D? Vitamin D is an essential nutrient that promises great health benefits, yet most adults fall short” Kathleen M. Zelman, webmd.com