Putting herbal supplements under the microscope. A new NIH initiative.

Like so many thousands of other cancer patients, I’m always scanning the news for the next great breakthrough that might keep my cancer in remission, and of course, herbal and dietary supplements will always be a part of that.

The media - both mainstream and online - is filled with ‘reports’ and ‘studies’ that purportedly demonstrate that one supplement or another has sure-fire anti-cancer properties. That’s when my nonsense detector goes into high gear. If it were only that easy.

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Nutritional supplements. Do you really need them?

This is a soapbox that I’ve stood firmly on for a couple decades now, as study after study has failed to show conclusive evidence that supplements do anything more than drain your wallet of money. In these hard economic times, it’s important to overcome wishful thinking about supplements. This is hard in the face of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent marketing them to us, and the little that is done to control the claims they make.

You can also thank the anti-government types for this. Leaving it up to the supplement industry to police themselves hasn’t been a success under any measure.

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Save your money on multi-vitamins

From the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter ( The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy ) the final word is save your money on those expensive multi-vitamins. This isn’t exactly breaking news, as I’ve been seeing small mentions of this before now, and already quit taking them. Tufts, however, is reporting that “the largest study ever of multimitamin use among older women has found that the pills made no significant difference in the risk of cancer, heart disease or overall mortality.”

The Tufts data is from research in the Archives of Internal Medicine, by Marian L. Neuhouser, Ph.D, of the Fred Hutchinson Research Center and colleagues. They noted that although the reasons and motivations of those who take multivitamins are wide ranging and vary greatly, fueled by product claims from the vitamin and supplement industry, yet “scientific data supporting the benefits of most supplements are lacking.”

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Is there any benefit from taking multivitamins?

From the Johns Hopkins Medical Letter, October 2009

Research has not been kind to multivitamin (and mineral) supplements. Most recently, data on over 161,000 participants enrolled in the landmark Women’s Health Inititative study revealed that women who regularly took multivitamins for approximately eight years were no less likely to develop breast, colon, and several other cancers or suffer a heart attack or stroke than women who did not take multivitamins.

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Tips and resources for vitamin and supplement smarts

There are hundreds of regulatory loopholes that allow makers of thousands of supplements to make outrageous claims and empty the wallets of the gullible. Here are some guidelines as well as some resources you can use to educate yourself, stay healthier and a bit richer:

Check with your health care provider: Don’t ever assume that supplements are always benign under all circumstances. Supplements can interfere with medications, but also interact causing harm. This is true of both prescription and over-the-counter medications. Also, supplements can have very different effects depending on the age of the user

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Kids not getting enough Vitamin D for future good health

Here’s something that I’d forgotten: Vitamin D isn’t a vitamin. It’s a hormone. That helps to understand why it’s so important.

Got money to burn? Fortified foods.

There’s one born every minute, so the saying goes, but in this day and age of copious and easily available information there’s just not much excuse for it… being a sucker that is.

But the food and beverage industry is counting on the wishful thinking of the uninformed to keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain in the pursuit of ‘health’ by eating or drinking beverages and food that have been ‘fortified.’

I say “keep your fortified faux foods and just give me simple, real food.” Six ingredients or less, preferably the kind that needs no label and no package.

Apparently, the Center for Science in the Public Interest agrees, and here is just a partial list of the ‘food products’ ( note I didn’t say food) that is being hawked to consumers:

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Nutrition Action from CSPI

That’s the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of my enduringly favorite sources of reliable information. Really, if you want the straight scoop about food, nutrition and other health and wellness issues, this is one of the best places you can go to.

In this months’ newsletter there is a large article on how to keep your brain young - which all of us seem to be interested in these days. It seems that the bottom line is as follows:

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Heart failure and hip fractures- the connection

According to the Hohns Hopkins Medical Letter, Health After 50, researchers have found that among more than 16,000 feart patients, those with heart failure were four times more likely to sustain a fracture ( primarily at the hip) than patients who had other types of heart condition.

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Do you get enough Vitamin D?

I’ve been beating this Vitamin D drum for several years now, since the Unviersity of San Diego came out with their ground breaking research on the importance of the vitamin in so far as keeping strong, healthy bones - in addition to perhaps keeping cancer at bay.

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Ginko Biloba: save your money

Use of the herb Ginkgo biloba, claimed to have beneficial effects on memory and cognition, didn’t reduce the rate of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease among more than 1,500 elderly study participants after 6.1 years of use, according to a new study.

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Making the label promises meet the reality

Here’s a good example of how good government can work in our favor:

THE US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is trying to make it easier—for consumers as well as smaller food packagers—to understand label claims for antioxidant and high-potency products. The agency recently published guidelines to help smaller firms comply with these labeling rules, following up on regulations issued in September 2007.

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Still taking Vitamin E? Time to reconsider.

Researchers at UC Berkeley discovered vitamin E in 1922, and since then countless studies have been done on this still mysterious substance. Because its chief function seems to be as an antioxidant, neutralizing potentially harmful free radicals in the body, E became a superstar as the antioxidant theory of disease gained wider and wider attention. Would high doses of vitamin E prove to be the key to good health—preventing cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, as well as producing glowing skin, good eyesight, and other benefits? Studies have yielded contradictory findings, but so far the answer seems to be no.

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