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The Man Who Convinced Us We Needed Vitamin Supplements
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has an interesting piece on the life and work of the scientist most responsible for moms around the world giving their kids Vitamin C tablets to fight off colds, Linus Pauling. From the article: 'On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn't. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. "It's been a tough week for vitamins," said Carrie Gann of ABC News. These findings weren't new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world's greatest quack.'"
Part of the whole vitamin craze is how lazy people are.
The thing is, even if you have a horrible diet you probably still get all the essential vitamins and minerals. The few that were making people sick got added decades ago (iodine to salt, vitamin D to milk, everything to cereal, etc.)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No, but deliberately shouting from your soapbox (and selling millions of books) in the absence of solid evidence does make you a quack. Pauling was effectively giving medical advice to the millions to his own benefit, without adequately answering his critics.
I find it interesting that the Paulings advocated megadoses of vitamin C to prevent/fight cancer, and then they both died of cancer. "It seems fate is not without a sense of irony."
Linus Pauling was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his 60s and given a few months to live, then went on living to the age of 93. So either the megadoses of vitamin C really did help him live another 30 years, or he had a rare spontaneous remission. You can't really blame him for reaching the conclusion that he did.
that almost everything you know about nutrition is wrong, often started up by one person or a group of people who failed to prove even loose correlation, yet people take up their suggestions and after a while they become 'common knowledge'.
Most multivitamins contain ingredients that pass through your digestive tract without even being absorbed. What does get absorbed is excessive and the system is unfamiliar with these huge doses of bioavailable vitamins and your system works overtime to eliminate it. Puts a real beating on the kidneys.
To extend the ridiculousness, nobody has ever proved that fat or meat are bad for you, yet people avoid them both and suffer nutritionally. In the 50's, Ancel Keys wrote a paper on his lipid theory where he 'proved' that fat was bad for you by eliminating the data from 17 of 23 countries he studied. The 17 he threw out were large consumers of fats with no problems with heart disease or cancer, such as the Innuit and Masai. He also noted in his study that there was no connection between dietary cholesterol and cholesterol levels in blood, but everyone seems to have skipped that part.
50 years of studies showed that salt was also not at all harmful to the average person, but doctors couldn't shake the idea of salt raising blood pressure temporarily so they gamed a study called Intersalt, where...you guessed it...they deleted around 40% of the data that included people who ate plenty of salt and led perfectly healthy lives. The excuse? "We already know that salt is bad for you, so if people say they ate it and were healthy, then they were lying". Hmm. It should be interesting to note at this point that all these studies do go on what people say they did and didn't eat and did or didn't do. Faulty data in the first place.
No study has ever proven that MSG is bad for you, in fact its approved by each and every equivalent of the FDA worldwide with zero dissenters, and its been eaten by billions of people for a century with no ill health effects. All it does is make healthy food taste better so you're more likely to eat it. In fact, the studies that were run showed more false positives as a placebo effect than actual reactions. Fun part is the whole thing goes back to one doctor who wasn't a nutritional expert writing a letter noting a possible 'chinese food syndrome' that he suggested at random might be MSG related. Its an amino acid derived from boiling kombu seaweed.
Meat is bad? The studies that say so point out that most of the people who eat meat, bacon and so forth also smoke, drink, don't exercise and live a lousy lifestyle. Of course they do, we've been telling people that meat is bad for them for 60 years, so anyone that eats it doesn't care about their health. Yet there is no study whatsoever that ever tested perfectly healthy people with a good lifestyle whose health suffered when they ate meat.
What IS bad for you are most pills, supplements, things in cans, fake 'diet' brownies and cookies, sugar, processed foods, vegetable oils except for olive, processed starches, and high energy/low nutrition foods that make up the bulk of the 'western diet'. Eat meat, quality fats, whole fruits and veg and steer clear of the high profit, easy to produce items made from grains and processed starches.
If that seems hard to believe, recall that we were told for decades that cigarettes were good for us, with doctors recommending particular brands. We were also moved from relatively healthy animal fats/butter to transfats, partially hydrogenated fats and so forth. That recommendation probably killed millions. Eggs are bad/good/bad/good/bad/good. By the way, they're just fine and a great source of B vitamins and protein.
It's not necessarily laziness. Vitamin D, for example, is only created if your skin receives sunlight. Godd luck getting that in the winter when you have to spend all of the daylight inside an office.
Mainstream and accepted view is that vitamin supplements in proper dosage are a good insurance for health. AMA, AAP, etc.
There are always studies supporting an opposing view of anything and everything.
I take four types of supplements, mostly because I'm pretty athletic and active:
1. Omega 3-6-9/fish oil because as a vegetarian with a family history of poor cholesterol, it helps
2. Creatine because you don't get much creatine as a vegetarian, and it's only water weight and significantly improves my lifts
3. Multivitamins twice a week because being athletic means that I don't get all my nutrition from just food -- my annual physicals have consistently shown lower levels of Vitamin D and B12
4. And of course, whey protein because I can't hit my protein numbers as a vegetarian -- I aim for 1.2g/lbm, and whey is a simple and easy way to meet your macros.
Vitamin D is absorbed by your gut just fine. In fact, decreasing sunlight exposure and getting D3 as a supplement reduces the risk of skin cancer.
For nutrients to find their way into vegetables, they have to be in the ground first, and if they aren't there, then you don't get to eat them.
If this was remotely true then eating dirt would allow starving people to cut out the agricultural middleman. A dessert of manure would complement the main course perfectly.
In reality plants are cellular tissue mostly made from water and atmospheric CO2 with a dash of colouring and flavours. Their growth depends on having enough but not too much water, enough sunlight to power the process, the presence of alkaline or acid soils and the ability to deter pests. Some of the proteins and other cellular constituents of plants and such happen to be good for us, but not all of them -- see belladonna and potato greens for counterexamples.
Amino acids in plants don't lurk around in the soil to be picked up by the root system, they are constructed by nanotech factories in the plant's cells, same with the nutrients and some vitamins in muscle tissue and other constituent parts of the animals we eat.
First of all, a lot of modern vegetables are grown as fast as possible, so they contain less fibre and "nutrients" and more water than when we were satisfied with one harvest per year.
Second of all, it's not just about vegetables. We need to get some "rare" vitamins from nuts, meat and such. With the current diet as we have it, meat is grown way faster too, containing arguably less of these rare vitamins than before. We eat a lot less unprocessed food than we used to, especially nuts tend to be roasted and such. A lot of processed food contains arguably less vitamins and nutrients than it used to when we ate more fresh and only slightly cooked food.
Maybe some cultivates are more nutrient than others, but a lot of cultivates are cells with water in them these days. We eat way more processed food than we used to, also diminishing the nutrient value of our food. It may be that we can grow bigger, faster and healthier crops, but once they enter our mouth, they are probably less nutrient than they were on average 50 years ago.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
You're confusing vegetarian and vegan. Vegans eschew the use of animal products (including not eating milk, eggs, cheese etc). Vegetarians don't eat animals, but usually eat animal products (that don't directly involve their death). Also, vegetarians are often quite happy to wear leather shoes, but will refuse to eat them.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&gwh=C55932C623A00AD8AD823E3855A54699
One of the biggest problems with vitamin supplements is that neither the takers nor the manufacturers (nor doctors prescribing supplements) pay any attention to absorption pathways. They also tend to ignore variants, which is a problem with a broader category of nutrients than just vitamins. There is a pretty decent scientific basis for the idea that good levels of vitamins are healthy, but supplements are usually taken in ways that are likely to make things worse rather than better through crowding out other essential vitamins and minerals that get absorbed through the same pathway.
Take zinc. It was found that zinc can denature viruses, so a viral sore throat can have its symptoms somewhat alleviated by zinc lozenges. But zinc is absorbed through the same pathway as copper, and the sort of large doses of zinc that people are taking for cold remedies is probably crowding out reasonable levels of copper absorption. And guess what copper's critical for? White blood cells and your immune system, the functions that can really do something about colds. Usually there's some bit of news, that the media gets wrong, then the general public gets even more wrong, and what the average consumer does in respect to a new scientific development ends up being completely counter-productive. Thus the news that zinc can denature viruses on contact turned into people taking zinc supplement pills with ads on the side of the bottle about taking them for colds. But pillsâ"as opposed to lozengesâ"do not result in significant concentrations of zinc where the virus is, and then they end up weakening the immune system by crowding out copper absorption.
Vitamin E is another excellent example. "Vitamin E" is 8 different vitamins that serve very different roles in the body. But they are absorbed through the same pathway and are highly subject to crowding-out. Basically, due to a terminology problem that the 8 distinct vitamins got lumped together as "Vitamin E," people who take vitamin E supplements end up deficient in 7 essential vitamins, unless they're taking reasonable doses of multitocopherol supplements, which isn't what much of anybody takes.
This tendancy to lump things together has lead to another super popular modern marketing disaster, Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is not a type of fatty acid, it's a class of fatty acids encompassing many different molecules. It turns out that only the fish-derived versions demonstrate any of the health benefits, but basically every food in the grocery store touting "Omega 3" all over the label is using plant sources, where they might as well be adding a gram of canola oil or corn oil for all the health benefits you'll be getting. Everything touting the helath benefits of flax seeds have no scientific basis, the the science is quite clear that the Omega 3 fatty acids in flax do not exhibit any of the hormone-like beneficial properties such as reducing inflammation that the fish Omega 3 fatty acids have.
I strongly suspect that in the long-term it will turn out that taking appropriate supplements is a very good idea for health, but right now, the science hasn't explored the area thoroughly enough to make solid recommendations given the complexity of the subject, and what little we do know has very little effect on what manufactures make and advertise and what consumers actually take. Which probably leads to the negative outcomes.
If you want to try to figure out, based on what we know, what the best guesses might be about what supplements to actually take, try reading up on the work of Bruce Ames and Andrew Weil. They don't have easy answers, but Bruce Ames did brilliant research, and Andrew Weil makes practical best-guess recommendations based upon the current state of the science.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Also, there are food deserts, places where getting actual real grown food is not practically possible, and fabricated food is the only type available. The concept is well known in the US.
Yes, well known, and totally wrong. It's a myth, and you could have found dozens of articles in about .01 seconds, like this one:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/food-desert-myth-article-1.1065165
Why do people just toss off completely wrong "facts" that they can disabuse themselves of in a couple of seconds? Like "more people are killed by baseball bats than guns", when it's actually more killed by baseball bats than LONG GUNS, but if you compare all guns to all blunt objects, it's overwhelmingly guns we have to thank for making homicide and suicide so easy.
I guess people prefer their preconceptions to the truth.
Michael Pollan makes a similar claim in "In Defense of Food" on page 115:
Since the widespread adoption of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has declined substantially, according to figures gathered by the USDA, which has tracked the nutrient content of various crops since then. Some researchers blame this decline on the condition of the soil; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding, which has consistently selected for industrial characteristics such as yield rather than nutritional quality.
More detail is given on page 118.
As mentioned earlier, USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent. Government figures from England tell a similar story: declines since the fifties of 10 percent or more in levels of iron, zinc, calcium, and selenium across a range of food crops. To put this in more concrete terms, you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.
Here are some sources cited for that chapter that sound like they might be relevant to those particular claims:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21430112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Nitrosodimethylamine#Properties
This study indicates Vitamin C may lower cancer risk from NDMA. NDMA can be found at dangerous levels in chlorinated water - essentially anyone with 'city water.' And there's currently no EPA regulation on NDMA content of drinking water.
I found the study referenced in this broad examine article on Vitamin C.
http://examine.com/supplements/Vitamin+C/#summary1-1
So, there's credence to the notion of Vitamin C for cancer prevention. One can argue prevention is better than chemo or radiation.
Is there any evidence that roundup ready crops are less nutritious?
Well, they *should* be, so we should expect them to be.
If you're going to go to all that effort to produce a GMO, you should pick the one that's going to be the most marketable. The varieties that are selected for modification are the biggest, most symmetrical, and those having the best shipping characteristics are usually not the best tasting, and their flesh lacks color which means they lack the concentrations of bioflavanoids, at least, and do not have the best flavor, along which usually comes nutrients, so it would be blind dumb luck, therefore very unlikely, for them to contain the most of other nutrients.
The same can also be said for non-GMO supermarket produce that's shipped far distances, but GMO's are probably part of that set.
To be fair, a GMO (e.g. yellow rice) can be made to promote nutrition - that's just not what Monsanto does in the commerical market, and therefore gives GMO's a bad name.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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