Sugar Blossom

You can almost see everyday in your TV channel or other media from magazine to online ad, good visualizations of multivitamin advertisements with tantalizing promises of health improvement, which promise prevention to cancer to heart disease, as well as greater energy pack as fuel for daily activity - have lured millions of people to spend billions of dollars on the multivitamin purchases.

An article in the February 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine reported that multivitamin use did not able to protect the 161,808 postmenopausal women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative Study from common forms of cancer, heart attacks, or strokes. And the numbers of deaths during the 8 years of the study were the same in vitamin users as in non-users. Still, it is important to recognize that this was an observational study, not a more meaningful clinical trial. Although these findings apply only to women, other studies have also failed to show benefits of multivitamins in older men.

These results are not at all surprising to people for several reasons. No large study has shown that multivitamins can significantly benefit healthy men and women. In addition, for some years physicians prescribed folic acid and vitamins B12 and B6 in the hopes of preventing heart attacks and strokes by lowering blood levels of “homocysteine” (high blood levels of homocysteine are associated with an increased risk of coronary and other vascular diseases). A number of recent studies however have shown that: while these vitamins do lower “homocysteine” levels, they do not prevent heart attacks or strokes. Many doctors have also prescribed the antioxidants vitamin E and beta-carotene to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Instead, new studies have proven that these supplements are not so protective and may even be harmful for the consumers.

Everybody would agree that an adequate intake of vitamins is essential to human’s health; but however, the best source of vitamins should only be obtained from eating enough healthy foods rather than from swallowing instant vitamin supplements. What about vitamins being a great source of energy? Some multivitamin ads do indeed claim that their supplements boost energy; and some professional athletes gobble handfuls of vitamin pills to increase their energy and strength. But scientists and researchers have learned and proved from long time ago that the real energy comes from calories, never from vitamins (vitamins only helps the body to help higher productivity of cellular functions). The bias understanding also applied on the highly touted cholesterol-lowering effects of substances added to some multivitamin supplements which are also still unproven scientifically.

All this is not to say that specific vitamins supplements are never desirable. Multivitamins are only beneficial for some groups of people: with a very-low-calorie weight-loss diet; strict vegetarians; heavy alcohol drinkers; and individuals who are not getting an adequate diet because they are too sick or too poor and are unable to prepare proper meals for themselves. Vitamins can also be valuable in certain health situations:
- Folic acid supplements in women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant can help to prevent serious neural-tube defects that affect the baby’s brain and spine.
- Supplements that contain more vitamin D and calcium than is present in regular multivitamin pills can help older women (and men) to avoid osteoporosis and bone fractures.
- Supplements of vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, zinc, and copper might able to slow down the progression of vision loss in people with early macular degeneration.

While the acceptance of good cultivated variety of plants would need minimal range of a decade to be proven worthy; an 8-year follow-up period are not long enough to show that multivitamins really protect people against cancers that take many years to develop. The results of the studies on vitamins so far point to one conclusion: Healthy people who eat enough calories from a varied diet do not benefit from multivitamin supplements.

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