Forums >Health and Nutrition>Vitamin supplementation and mortality
not bad for mile 25
I was checked for vit D and was below the recommended levels. However, the recommended levels have changed (in the upward direction) recently. A year or so ago I would not have been considered deficient. Hm....
Yes, I believe the science establishing the RDAs is weak, and your RDAs are probably different from mine. Lots of guesswork, and we can just hope our bodies sort it all out successfully.
Before diagnosis of my throid condition I was trying about anything that could be a cause of my fatigue -- including B vitamins. After only a few weeks of moderate supplementation I had my blood work run, and my B12 level was somewhere in excess of 1000% the upper limit of normal.
If you were a woman in Iowa, you'd be dead right now.
FWIW, I'm not sure anyone here is saying that ludicrous amounts of a nutrient are harmless. The extent of supplementation is a point I hope the article teases out -- are these women taking a daily vitamin providing 100% of some nutrients or a handful of tablets totaling up to 1000% of the RDAs?
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As a layperson, that another thing that annoys me about some studies. I read a headline that says something like, "Study Finds Daily Coffee Comsumption Causes Cancer" and then you read on to find out that the study looked at people who drank 12 cups of coffee a day or something equally ridiculous. Yeah, if you look at people who consume/use laboratory rat levels of products you'll probably find some disturbing stuff.
Hope no one decides to study Twizzlers. If they turn out to be really bad for you, I'm in trouble.
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Heh.
... I have a hard time believing that supplements lead to more deaths than the lifestyles practiced by more than half of Americans...
Sure, people do all sorts of silly stuff unrelated to taking supplements, but that's got nothing to do with the pros and cons of taking supplements.
As a layperson, that another thing that annoys me about some studies. I read a headline that says something like, "Study Finds Daily Coffee Comsumption Causes Cancer" and then you read on to find out that the study looked at people who drank 12 cups of coffee a day or something equally ridiculous. Yeah, if you look at people who consume/use laboratory rat levels of products you'll probably find some disturbing stuff. Hope no one decides to study Twizzlers. If they turn out to be really bad for you, I'm in trouble.
It's often not that the studies are bad, but that they're completely misreported.
Ben Goldacre has made a career out of highlighting how poorly (medical) science is reported in the main stream media. His book Bad Science is a good read. He has a weekly column in the guardian newspaper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/badscience and lots of similar stuff on his website: http://www.badscience.net/
John
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/171/18/1625 A rather large study of older women (damn I'm jealous of people who have large data sets to play with!), a regression analysis of mortality and supplementation, particularly iron. Personally I find complex multivariate regression models to be a little suspect (let's describe the universe in one study!), but I'm only a casual statistician, at best, and in a former life. Trent will say something about eating food, and he's right, however I still think there's evidence for benefits of supplementation in some cases (e.g., vitamin D for many of us). This study does highlight other problems.
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/171/18/1625
A rather large study of older women (damn I'm jealous of people who have large data sets to play with!), a regression analysis of mortality and supplementation, particularly iron. Personally I find complex multivariate regression models to be a little suspect (let's describe the universe in one study!), but I'm only a casual statistician, at best, and in a former life.
Trent will say something about eating food, and he's right, however I still think there's evidence for benefits of supplementation in some cases (e.g., vitamin D for many of us). This study does highlight other problems.
I love this website Bad Science for thinking about these types of questions.
John www.wickedrunningclub.com
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Feeling the growl again
I was affiliated with some research that made CNN years ago. They came in the lab and interviewed my boss. I was very excited to turn on the news to watch the piece...and peeved to see their medical "expert" completely misinterpret the results. Since then I've seen it time and time again with research I am quite familiar with. Needless to say I really don't listen to mainstream media for that type of thing anymore.
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I'm sure. It makes it really hard to make sense of it all.
It's been interesting to think about. I'm probably still going to take my multi today but I'm also going to do more reading on the issue. Thanks, OP, for posting!
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I myself have some of the higher priced urine in the county.
Runners run
No thanks, priced out of my budget.
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