Prominent Nutritionist Says Wall Street Journal Wrong on Vitamins
PR Newswire
04-13-06
BLOOMINGDALE, Ill., April 12, 2006 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- "The Case Against
Vitamins, an article by the Wall Street Journal
which originally ran on March 20, 2006 and is being widely reprinted, should
be thrown out of court," says Neil Levin, a
Chicago-area Certified Clinical Nutritionist. "The danger here is that a reporter
who is neither a nutritionist nor a doctor may
dissuade people from utilizing products which can help them maintain their health.
And that is harmful."
There is an understandable tendency for the media to embrace controversial stories
in an environment where a single study is touted
as negating all other studies, even though rogue studies are usually deeply flawed.
The "several studies" cited in this report have
been seriously criticized by experts without their rebuttals resulting in any
real effort to set the record straight, Levin points
out.
Provocative reports get wide coverage, but not the subsequent, legitimate criticism
of the studies. This leads to public confusion
about supplements and fuels a growing mistrust of the reliability of media reports
on all nutrition topics. Levin says that dietary
supplements are singled out as being harmful or useless, or both at once, when
these accusations are often not supported by good
data.
"This WSJ article singled out beta-carotene as promoting cancer, mentioning a
study on Finnish smokers. Yet that study's data was
recently reanalyzed, with researchers looking instead at total antioxidant intake.
They discovered that low antioxidant intake was
the real culprit in that original cancer study, not beta-carotene supplementation,"
Levin said.
The article reported that antioxidants may "promote some cancer and interfere
with treatments." The peer-reviewed journal CA from
the American Cancer Society published (online) Levin's analysis documenting dozens
of studies proving that specific vitamins and
antioxidants actually enhanced medical cancer therapies.
Many negative studies state that their results are not applicable to populations
other than the ones studied, yet get wide press
coverage positioned as being universally definitive. And evidence that the researchers
and the WSJ admit is "inconclusive" is still
publicized as an argument against taking Vitamin E, which Levin stresses is a
safe and effective nutritional supplement.
"The Vitamin E controversy should have been cleared up after the American Journal
of Clinical Nutrition did a far more thorough
review than the handful of studies used in the Annals of Internal Medicine review
article," Levin says. "Annals has, to its credit,
published dozens of critical comments from physicians and scientists, including
mine. The vastly more authoritative AJCN report,
"Vitamins E and C Are Safe Across A Broad Range Of Intakes", determined that
the Annals data indicated problems only in doses over
2,000 IU; not the 400 IU widely reported. The Food and Nutrition Board of the
Institute of Medicine has set the safe, upper
tolerable intake level for vitamin E at 1,500 IU daily. Research shows that Vitamin
E may be useful for people suffering from
Parkinson's, macular degeneration, cataracts, cancer and mercury toxicity. The
substantial body of evidence supporting supplements
may not sell papers the way controversial studies do, but it is weighty."
Reports that 'B-Vitamins don't lower risk for heart attacks' miss the point entirely,
according to Levin. Vitamins do lower levels
of homocysteine, an inflammatory substance, and reduce the number of non-fatal
strokes. Homocysteine as a theoretical cause of heart
disease is being challenged, but the B-Vitamins performed exactly as predicted.
The well-respected Lewin Group has published reports showing that proper use
of supplementation can save billions of dollars in
health care costs while reducing pain and suffering. There are FDA-approved health
claims for vitamins and minerals supported by
solid scientific claims. The total body of evidence supports benefits of dietary
supplementation. The risk of being hurt by a
vitamin is so low as to be unquantifiable, far less than the risk from contracting
a food borne illness or from taking a
pharmaceutical or OTC product like acetaminophen. "That's the real truth about
vitamins," Levin concludes.
Neil Levin, CCN, DANLA, is nutrition education manager at Bloomingdale, Illinois
based NOW Foods, Inc. and works to dispel
inaccurate health information.
CONTACT: Suzanne Shelton
suzan***@s*****.com
SOURCE The Shelton Group
CONTACT: Suzanne Shelton of Shelton Group, +1-847-676-4337, suzan***@s*****.com
URL: http://www.prnewswire.com
http://www.SheltonGroupPR.com www.prnewswire.com
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