How To Fake Medical Studies On Food Supplements

Because more and more people are discovering that natural therapies and food supplements are helping them in the fight against disease and fatigue, the pharmaceutical companies via the medical profession have engaged in lies and false studies to make people believe that taking supplements is wrong so that they continue to sacrifice themselves to spending the rest of their lives ill and having to pay for drugs and treatments that do not cure. Recently, another study was released to show that vitamins are bad for you. This blog will show an article by ABC News, just one of many that could have been picked from the pool of so called news reports from the main media which will never inform people about the truth, and an article showing how this is all false. I will put my own comments in green.


Are Too Many Vitamins Bad for Your Health? Supplements May Lead to Increased Risk of Death, New Research Suggests

By BETH M. WICKLUND, M.D.
ABC News Medical Unit
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Diet/story?id=2908054&page=1

Feb. 27, 2007 — We tend to think of vitamins as healthy. But can you have too much of a good thing?

New research suggests this may be the case when it comes to supplements.

In a meta-analysis study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reviewed 68 studies involving more than 200,000 patients to determine whether taking high-dose vitamin supplements — in particular, beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium — affected your risk of dying.

What they found was that some of these supplements actually increased risk of death by a small, but significant, amount.

Taking large doses of vitamin A increased the risk of death by 16 percent. Smaller increases were seen for vitamin E (4 percent) and beta carotene (7 percent).

Vitamin C and selenium did not appear to affect the risk of dying.

But exactly how the high doses of supplements affect the risk of death is not clear. The study authors speculate that perhaps the vitamins interfere with the body's defense mechanisms.

The researchers arrived at their conclusions by pooling the results from many different, previously published studies.

Because each of the studies involved in this meta-analysis was very different, though, it is hard to generalize the findings to one particular person, such as you or a family member.

Dr. Meir Stampfer, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, states, "The effects might well differ according to particular characteristics of the population, such as enhanced risk among smokers for beta carotene, but no increased risk among nonsmokers."

Some Still Need Supplements

Select people should still take supplements. For instance, people who have had gastric bypass surgery need large amounts of vitamin A, says internist Dr. Tina Dobsevage, assistant clinical professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

She says she also prescribes vitamins D and B12 to patients who have low blood levels of these nutrients.

However, others have conditions that increase the health risk associated with certain supplements. Vitamin E, for example, has blood-thinning properties and may increase the risk of bleeding in people taking prescription blood thinners.

Information that large doses of some vitamins can be harmful is not new (is that because of the other many false studies conducted). When taken in excess, the fat-soluble vitamins — vitamins A, D, E and K — are stored in body fat tissues. This can lead to toxic buildup in the liver, brain and heart.

Excess amounts of water-soluble vitamins, on the other hand, are less hazardous because they are eliminated from the body in the urine.

It is also known that vitamins taken as supplements, rather than in whole foods, tend to be less beneficial. Thus, the study authors say, people should not shy away from fruits and vegetables for fear that they are overloading on vitamins (Natural vitamins come from fruits and vegetables, unlike the chemical vitamins used in the studies).

Vitamins a Big Business

An estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of U.S. adults — 80 million to 160 million people — look to vitamin supplements for a nutritional boost.

Supposed health benefits include longer life, a healthier heart and stronger bones.

Antioxidant supplements, which include the vitamins in the current study, are thought to fight off substances called "free radicals" and improve immune function.

Dr. Kathy Helzlsouer, a women's health specialist and director of the Prevention and Research Center at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, thinks the study has "extremely significant findings."

"This is a big industry," she said. "Even small risks, with widespread use, result in large numbers of women [and men] affected."

This echoes the thoughts of the study authors, who write, "The public health consequences may be substantial."

Should You Toss Your Supplements?

Doctors (Who are not trained in nutrition) tend to agree that moderation is key when it comes to vitamins.

After reviewing the study, internist Dr. Ted Palen of Colorado Permanente Medical Group said, "I will counsel patients that moderate multivitamin intake may be beneficial, but megadoses may actually be harmful (Would that include vitamin D? 60 minutes in the summer sun will produce 40,000 units in the body. And dark skinned people need far more as a supplement than light skinned people)."

Keith Ayoob, associate professor in the department of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, agrees.

"The best research says to take a complete multivitamin with 100 percent of the [recommended dietary allowance or RDA] and not more (The problem is that each country has a different RDA and all are too low; and how can they be the same for men and women, or for any weight for that matter)," he said.

Some doctors recommend concentrating on improving your diet rather than stressing about which supplements to take (Except that food does not have enough vitamins and minerals anymore because of the industrial methods used to farm).

People "should spend their money on multiple varieties and colors of vegetables and fruits, whole grains, and lean protein," said Dr. John Messmer, associate professor of family and community medicine at Pennsylvania State University's College of Medicine in Hershey, "and stop wasting it on supplements."

Dobsevage agrees. However, she said, "the American diet is so degraded, and so many of us no longer cook whole foods in our own homes for most of our meals, that I often recommend a modest level of vitamin and mineral supplementation — less than RDAs."

The conclusion I draw from this is that you should never take the chemical vitamins derived from crude oil which are the vitamins that are sold the most. People who take supplements and know what they are doing because they have spent some time studying this, always take natural supplements because they contain enzymes that are needed by the body and are always found with the vitamins. It is of course perfectly correct that you should eat as much fruits and vegetables as you can, but that is not enough anymore. When you take a good natural supplement you will experience the effect all these nutrients have within hours after years of being under nourished.


The big vitamin scare: American Medical Association claims vitamins may kill you (opinion)

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by: Mike Adams
http://www.newstarget.com/021653.html

The latest round in conventional medicine's ongoing attempts to discredit (and ultimately outlaw) nutritional supplements is found in a highly questionable study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which claims that vitamins actually increase the risk of death.

The study claims to have analyzed a collection of previous studies on Vitamin A, beta carotene, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and selenium, concluding that most of the nutrients are actually dangerous to human health. Of course, this is research from conventional medicine - an industry that promotes patented chemicals as perfectly safe, even though FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are killing 100,000 Americans each year. (Imagine the uproar if vitamins killed even a fraction of that number.)

To avoid getting hoodwinked by questionable research on "vitamins," you have to strongly consider the financial interests of the source of this research. JAMA accepts millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies each year, and its pages are absolutely packed with drug ads. The American Medical Association, for its part, has long worked to discredit alternative medicine and has even been found guilty by U.S. federal courts of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic medicine. The AMA, which is largely considered a joke by anyone familiar with natural health, is hardly a credible source for publishing scientific findings on nutrition. To protect the multi-billion dollar drug industry, the AMA would say practically anything, I believe.

How to fake a vitamin study

Faking a vitamin study to show supplements as harmful is extremely easy to pull off, by the way. All you have to do is use synthetic forms of the vitamins and avoid using natural, food-sourced vitamins. These synthetic vitamins - which are really just industrial chemicals - may be called "Vitamin E" or "Vitamin A" or even "Vitamin C" but they have no functional resemblance to the real vitamins that occur in nature. Every single study over the past two decades that has sought to discredit Vitamin E, for example, focused on using synthetic Vitamin E in order to show harm. It is curious that no researcher from the world of conventional medicine will ever test the natural, full-spectrum vitamins, nutrients and phytochemicals that appear in nature. You know why? Because they would discover a universe of natural medicine that makes patented prescription drugs obsolete.

A second way to fake a vitamin meta-data study is to simply cherry-pick the results you want to include in your meta-data analysis. This is a routine trick used by dishonest researchers who have an agenda of discrediting nutritional supplements. To pull this one off, they simply eliminate all previous studies that showed positive results for vitamins, and include only previous studies that showed negative results. Then they run a statistical analysis on all the studies they hand-picked and declare - surprise! - those vitamins are dangerous! Many of the studies on vitamin E, by the way, were conducted on dying heart patients who were only expected to live two weeks, regardless of what they took.

A third way to distort the science is to confuse people with statistical obfuscation. The reporting on this particular study, for example, confuses absolute risk with relative risk. Vitamin A, according to the reports on this study, increased mortality risk by 16 percent. But that is a relative risk number, meaning that if 1 person out of 100 normally died, then 1.16 people out of 100 would die when taking these synthetic Vitamin A supplements. In other words, it might not even be one additional person out of 100, or even out of 1000.

And yet, it is curious that when conventional medical researchers report the results of mortality risks for their prescription drugs, they always use absolute risk. They say things like, "Well, this drug only increased the risk by one percent." But what they are not saying is that it may be a 200% relative increase in mortality risk, depending on the baseline absolute mortality numbers. So if only 0.5 people out of 100 normally died from heart disease during a particular study, but 1.5 people died when taking a drug during that study, the relative risk increase is 200%. But the medical journals and the mainstream media will report is at a "one percent increase."

You see how the game is played? Here's the con:

. All statistics on the dangers of prescription drugs are reported as absolute risk to make the numbers seem smaller (and make drugs seem safe).

. All statistics on the dangers of synthetic vitamins are reported as relative risk to make the numbers seem larger (and vitamins seem dangerous).

And this is how conventional medicine lies with statistics. It's only one of the many tricks used to disinform the American public about the dangers of pharmaceuticals or the benefits of nutrition.

This research published in JAMA does remind us of one important point, however: synthetic chemicals are harmful to human health. If you take cheap "vitamins" made of these synthetic chemicals, you are doing yourself more harm than good. These cheap vitamin manufacturers, by the way, are usually owned by pharmaceutical firms. I would personally never take vitamins purchased at common retailers such as Wal-Mart or Walgreens. I only recommend and consume vitamins from high-end nutritional supplement companies.

Blurring the line to scare consumers

But conventional medicine researchers try to blur the line between "junk vitamins" and "quality vitamins" by classifying all nutritional supplements as "vitamins," regardless of what they're really made from. By discrediting a few synthetic chemicals, they can effectively dissuade the masses from taking ANY vitamins, including the good ones. And that is, of course, their goal: to use FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to scare consumers away from nutritional supplements so that patients will flock to the patented, synthetic chemicals that earn drug companies billions of dollars in profits. Drugs make money for Big Pharma, and vitamins compete with drug sales. Once you understand the economics and the motives of the parties involved here, the junk science con becomes quite obvious: Pushers of pharmaceuticals will always use dirty tricks to discredit nutritional supplements because it is in their financial interests to do so.

My own financial interests, by the way, are squeaky clean. I sell no supplements, I earn no money from supplement companies, and in fact I am not even paid by NewsTarget for my work on these articles. In terms of potential conflicts of interest, I have far more credibility than the AMA, a shady organization that remains mired in blatant conflicts of interest and a frightening agenda of pushing drugs, surgery and radiation onto as many Americans as possible.

Now, here's a common sense way to quickly realize the JAMA research is complete nonsense. Round up 100 people who are taking multiple pharmaceuticals, and compare their health to 100 people who are taking vitamins and nutritional supplements. Guess who's healthier? The supplement crowd will be healthier every time. It's the obvious question: If vitamins are so dangerous, where are all the dead vitamin takers? And if pharmaceuticals are so safe, where are all the super-healthy prescription drug patients? They are nowhere to be found.

The healthiest people, by far, are those who take supplements, who engage in regular exercise, and who avoid taking prescription drugs.

Why conventional medical researchers remain nutritionally illiterate

Western medicine still doesn't "get" nutrition. They think all health effects are achieved by single, isolated chemical constituents. But nutrition doesn't work that way. In nature, for example, Vitamin C is not a single chemical, but rather a symphony of complementary phytonutrients that work in concert. Conventional medical researchers almost never test plant medicine using full-spectrum nutrients. Why? Because they don't understand the concept of nutritional synergy.

The bottom line? Only fools believe research about nutrition that comes from the American Medical Association or its journal. Conventional medical researchers declaring that vitamins are worthless is about as credible as Bush Administration climatologists claiming there's no such thing as global warming.

With the publication of this research, the distortion of health reality is now complete. According to the Americal Medical Association, vitamins will kill you but pharmaceuticals will make you healthy.

Someone help me stop laughing before I blow out a lung and require surgery.