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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."
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.
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.
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.