NBC showed CBS how it's done.

NBC showed CBS how it’s done.

In the e-Alert “Katie, Bar the Door!” (1/17/07), I told you about an inept investigation of dietary supplements that appeared on the CBS Evening News last week. In the end, it seemed to be little more than a thinly veiled promotion for a new book that slams the supplement industry with wildly unbalanced reporting.

Later in the week, it appeared that NBC was up to the same sort of thing with a report on multivitamins. But where the CBS feature was heavy with accusations and low on details, the NBC item was the opposite: plenty of details, but no sanctimonious calls for stricter government regulation.

The NBC report, which appeared on Friday’s Today Show, looked at a laboratory review of 21 brands of multivitamins. The multis were tested for content (compared to content amounts listed on labels), purity, and dissolvability.

About half of the products were found be free of impurities, to dissolve quickly (ensuring absorption in the body), and to actually contain the amounts of vitamins stated on the labels. (Full details can be found at the Today Show web site – nbc.com – and the site for the company that conducted the tests – ConsumerLab.com.)

This sort of reporting does a service to consumers and supplement manufacturers alike. Consumers get a useful guide to several brands of multivitamins, while manufacturers that didn’t receive a passing grade got a wake up call to be more diligent about producing a safe and effective product.

And best of all – this was easily achieved without creating new regulations and adding unnecessary weight to a top-heavy government bureaucracy.

The one misstep: NBC couldn’t resist using scare tactics to draw viewers in. Here’s the title of the report (as it appeared on the NBC web site): “A Vitamin a Day May Do More Harm Than Good.” That’s simply misleading, giving viewers the impression that vitamins in general may do more harm than good.

A far more accurate (but less sexy) title: “If You Choose the Wrong Vitamin, it May Not Help As Much As You Think.”

As always, it comes down to choice: Freedom to make our own healthcare choices, and the responsibility to do the necessary research to make good choices. Kudos to NBC for giving consumers information they can use.