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comment by lil
lil  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Scientists say vitamins and minerals are a "waste of money"

After presenting the results of the studies, the author of the article says,

    Personally, I'm not convinced that we should completely stop taking vitamins and supplements. While I agree that foods packed with nutrients can provide most, if not all, of our dietary needs, the fact of the matter is that many of us eat very poorly.
Surely the thousands and thousand of research subjects will have the same poor or good diet as everyone else. The author really wants to believe that vitamins are good for him, so he will continue to believe it. This makes me somewhat skeptical of Dvorsky as a science writer. He's a local fellow - do you know him Cadell?




kleinbl00  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Never ever Gawker ever. Paragraph 1 of the linked editorial, sentence 2 and 3:

    "First, Fortmann and colleagues (1) systematically reviewed trial evidence to update the US Preventive Services Task Force recommendation in community dwelling adults with no nutritional deficiencies. After reviewing 3 trials of multivitamin supplements and 24 trials of single or paired vitamins that randomly assigned more than 400,000 participants, the authors concluded that there was no clear evidence of a beneficial effect of supplements on all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease or cancer."

This is good, this is valuable. What it says is that if you are getting all the nutrients you need, getting more of them will not prevent heart disease, cancer, or "death."

What it doesn't say is "Scientists say vitamins and minerals are a waste of money."

It doesn't take much - a google search of "prevalence of nutritional deficiency United States" ; try it! - to learn that more than 10% of Americans are nutritionally deficient, according to the CDC. More than 30% of blacks, in fact. So for that cohort, vitamins are probably a pretty good idea.

The studies also say nothing about quality of life - whether iron or b12 will give you energy when you lack it. Whether selenium benefits prostate health. That wasn't the target of the study.

I've worked with wastewater treatment plants. Lemme tell ya - every morning, you see a checkerboard of little half-digested Centrums in amongst the "biosolids." The vitamins you can get over the counter have, if I recall correctly, about a 5% absorption rate. People really do take them as a panacea, as a ward against evil spirits. There's plenty of reason to study whether vitamins are effective broadband against cancer, which is what's happening here. There's ample justification to get the proof that popping a 1-a-day will not counterbalance that pack of American Spirits in your purse.

But that's not the sort of nuance you get from Gawker.

Kinda gives me pause. I mean, I typed "vitamins" into Google and got 39,000 news articles. It's pretty much the health story of the month. Yet here we are.

Giving Gawker hits.

theadvancedapes  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    This makes me somewhat skeptical of Dvorsky as a science writer. He's a local fellow - do you know him Cadell?

I will vouch for Dvorsky. I think he is a brilliant writer, thinker, and futurist. He is also good for the culture (example: this post ). This was not one of my favourite posts by his, but I don't know much about the science behind multivitamins etc. so I wanted to hear some of the reaction to this piece from the hubski community.

achughes  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

But at the same time I wouldn't go change my whole lifestyle over an blog post that only lists secondary and even tertiary sources.

lil  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Of course not. Do what is best for you.

There have been several articles posted here on vitamins. One not long ago about how the vitamin business started with Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and his megadoses of Vitamin C - how study after study proved him wrong, how he first proposed that vitamin C would protect against the common cold and everything else. The Vitamin Myth was published in the Atlantic. in July. I'd love to know your opinion of that article.

I know a lot of people who believe vitamins are helping them. I hope they are.

b_b  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I know a lot of people who believe vitamins are helping them. I hope they are.

I think we all do. But that fact that supplements don't work pharmacologically doesn't mean they don't so something for the person actually taking them. I'm not advocating for anyone to take a placebo on purpose, but we all do weird shit, have rituals, habits, and inexplicable tendencies that just make us feel better. I guess the difference is that when I go through my ritualistic routines, it's because I'm nuts, and not because I'm being marketed to do so by a for profit company. I think that is why us vitamin haters hate on them so much; they're a cynical play on people's insecurities by soulless companies.

lil  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    This follow-up study did find a statistically significant increase. Men who took 400 IU of vitamin E every day during the study were 17% more likely than men who didn’t take the supplement to develop prostate cancer during the 7 years they were monitored by researchers.
This is from the American Cancer Society. Crap, I'd better send that to the spousal unit now. I think he takes 400 IU of E.
b_b  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There was another large cohort study done in Finland, I believe, that showed that vitamin E correlated to earlier death in people already diagnosed with cancer.

thundara  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I know a lot of people who believe vitamins are helping them. I hope they are.

If you're trying to convince them otherwise, you could mention that at no point must any vitamin / supplement manufacturer prove any sort of safety or efficacy to their product, nor are they required to have any sort of quality assurance in their manufacturing process. A third of randomly sampled vitamins didn't contain a single trace of the molecule listed on the bottle.

lil  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, that too.

I don't try to convince people of anything. If I were to try that, I'd have to come up with some version of kleinbl00's argument that he constructed here.

humanodon  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sorry to change the subject, but I just picked up a book called Predictably Irrational. I wonder if you've read it? I've just started reading it, but it's pretty interesting so far. I know that in general, people love to believe that they are logical, rational beings, but even (maybe especially?) children can see by observing adults, that this is not so.

Anyway, the connection I'm making is that "health" is a mysterious thing and something that most adults become increasingly concerned with over time, but feel somewhat powerless to "win" against, which really seems to be the selling point of vitamins, minerals and extracts.

kleinbl00  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's an incredible book. The Upside of Irrationality is pretty good too.

Vitamins are talismans. They are a ward against evil spirits. They are a nutriceutical rabbit's foot.

Which is not to say there aren't good vitamins. It's also not to say that there aren't good vitamins that can help you and will do great things for your overall health. But they're hard for you to buy them - on purpose - because if it has an effect, overusing it can have a negative effect.

My wife was a vitamin rep in school. She still sells a lot of vitamins. But she won't give anybody anything until she's done blood tests. She had me on this one that I had to take within about 5 minutes of eating or it'd give me the goddamn dry heaves. They're not-fucking-around vitamins. I prefer not to take them. But they were prescribed me by a doctor who saw my blood and saliva tests and fuckin' a if they didn't change my metabolism.

These are not the vitamins you buy at CVS. By and large, you barely digest those before pooping them out. Take them after a night of binge drinking, though, and they might cut down on the hangover. Take them every day and yeah - as the study says, they probably won't cut down on your risk of heart disease.

But c'mon. In your heart of hearts, you knew that, just like with the lucky rabbit's foot.

b_b  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Which is not to say there aren't good vitamins. It's also not to say that there aren't good vitamins that can help you and will do great things for your overall health. But they're hard for you to buy them - on purpose - because if it has an effect, overusing it can have a negative effect.

Yeah and this is where a lot of the problem is. So many vitamin peddlers try to convince people that they don't need doctors' advice on these matters. If someone is anemic or has rickets or scurvy (picking on the obvious ones, certianly there are many disease states caused by nutrient defficiencies; hell, vitamin A deficiency is world's leading cause of blindness, I believe), obviously the best solution is supplements. It's an inexpensive and effective treatment for a lot of specific diseases. But where the US goes entirely wrong for vitamins, OTC drugs and, most importantly, prescription drugs, is in our unwillingness to regulate their marketing. Why the fuck should you or I be able to go into out doctor's office and demand Lipitor, because we saw on TV that it makes the salt and peppery hair guy smile more when he's on the beach? It's insanity. We got rid of tobacco ads, because they were deemed to be harmful. That was only possible once public opinion was so strong against tobacco companies that it was more expeditious for politicians to not take Philip Morris' giant bags of money. The same thing needs to happen with drugs. Unfortunately, drugs (and vitamins) are way harder to deal with, because they do help people, a lot of people. I think the regulatory structure needs to change, and change dramatically. People can't be blamed for not being that well informed. The personal responsibility argument only goes so far. After all, if advertising didn't work, nobody would do it.

kleinbl00  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    But where the US goes entirely wrong for vitamins, OTC drugs and, most importantly, prescription drugs, is in our unwillingness to regulate their marketing.

Got it in one.

You can blame Reagan for this one. Also for relaxing rules regulating marketing to children. Under Nixon, hospitals were non-profit. Under Reagan, healthcare became the most profitable industry in the United States.

humanodon  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh yes, I should have been clear that I meant OTC stuff. Like them Flintstones chewables. I knew a guy that went on a crazy bender once and got beri-beri, who was given the kind of vitamins you describe. It's a good thing those kind aren't so readily available, as I'm sure they'd be misused.

I am all for lucky rabbit's feet if they make people feel better, provided they don't go around disputing science because of it. For example, my uncle is a Born Again bishop, who insists that he cast a demon out of my cousin. But, from his description, it really just sounds like she was really badly feverish and then the fever broke. If praying had merely made him feel better about my cousin getting over being sick, I'd be ok with that (if he'd also taken her to a doctor).

kleinbl00  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is where I tend to lose the /r/skeptic crowd - "Placebo effect" includes the word "effect."

Ariely spends a good chapter on it. Take two placebos and tell your subject that one of them costs 10 cents per pill. Now tell him that the other placebo costs 10 dollars per pill. Both of them are placebo. The more "expensive" one is a better placebo. Different cultures respond better to different procedures: Germans love shots, for some reason. Americans like pills. It's a real, measurable, quantifiable effect.

Your uncle didn't cast a demon out of your cousin. And yeah - the fever probably broke. but if your cousin truly believed your uncle, your uncle's mumbo-jumbo may damn well have helped the fever break.

There's a reason every culture humanity has ever fostered has witch doctors and shamen. They work. Not as well as legit medicine generally, but better than nothing. And in this country, we dismissively tuck that into "bedside manner."

humanodon  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Your uncle didn't cast a demon out of your cousin. And yeah - the fever probably broke. but if your cousin truly believed your uncle, your uncle's mumbo-jumbo may damn well have helped the fever break.

    There's a reason every culture humanity has ever fostered has witch doctors and shamen. They work. Not as well as legit medicine generally, but better than nothing. And in this country, we dismissively tuck that into "bedside manner."

No arguments there; the power of belief is something that is often scorned in the US. Why discard a tool when one is available?

user-inactivated  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So I just read that Wikipedia page and came away feeling that I don't need to read the book. T/F?

kleinbl00  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

False. A summary of Avatar would tell you the plot but it wouldn't be entertaining, it wouldn't stick with you, and it wouldn't give you a chance to form your own perspective.

He's a very engaging author.

user-inactivated  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The conclusions/experiments Wikipedia listed just seemed very simple. But I've got two recommendations to read it now from two people so I'll look for it.

humanodon  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm only on chapter 4, so I can't speak for the whole book, but the Wikipedia page certainly is thorough. I will say that it's well-written and that the examples are great and that I enjoy the read. What's nice is that the style invites introspection into one's own behaviors, rather than simply the presentation of findings.

user-inactivated  ·  3752 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Okay, I'll keep an eye out for it.

thundara  ·  3753 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Aye, hence the "If", I have, for the most part, given up trying to actively change anyone else's mind about something they haven't asked me my thoughts on. Internet forums usually make for better discourse and people have less of a tendency to pull facts out of their ass (Or at least, when they do, it's easier to call them out for it).