Should You Stop Taking Vitamins?
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Everyday every after breakfast I take at least three tablets of different kinds of vitamins. But what happens if I stop taking these vitamins? Does it really give me more benefits?
A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking multivitamins and other supplements may actually shorten your life. Shocking, isn’t it. So should you stop taking vitamins then? Information in the study were taken from nearly 40,000 women several times over 22 years. Questions were asked about all sorts of health issues, including vitamin and supplement use. After analyzing the data collected from these nearly 40,000 women, researchers identified seven supplements that actually seem to speed up death, namely, Vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper, and the innocent looking multivitamin. The increase in death rate ranged from 2.2 percent (multivitamins) to an alarming 18 percent (copper).
All of which raised to the question should one quit taking vitamin pills? Well the answer is you shouldn’t. Why? For a lot of reasons: First, the study conducted was observational which means that researchers followed a group of people over time but didn’t test the supplement group against a placebo group. Although age, diabetes, physical activity, high blood pressure, and a few dietary habits were carefully noted for control, there may be factors that they did not account for the skewed results. Jaakko Mursu, Ph.D. of the University of Eastern Finland admitted. Secondly,the study followed a group of older women averaging to 62 years old which is quite not the representative sample of the population. And it has been well established that iron supplements increase the rish of heart disease in post menopausal women (which is why there is no iron in Centrum Silver and other multivitamins for older adults). And copper can be toxic in large amounts and is prevalent in many natural foodk, such as vegetables, nuts, so few people need large doses of supplementation. Thirdly, people who take vitamins generally make more poorer health choices. A study in Psychological Science earlier this year revealed that the perceived benefits of multivitamins may cause people to cheat on their diets and workout regimens. Wen-Bin Chiou, PH.D, a professor of National Sun Yat-Sen University and author of the study told Men’s Health that taking dietary supplements increases perceived invulnerability. In other words, its not the vitamins that are harmful, is the life they choose while taking the vitamins. Lastly, scores of studies have found benefits to certain vitamins and supplements. “ In my mind, there’s no question that low levels of vitamin D are associated with heart disease and many other issues including obesity and type 2 diabetes. I recommend it routinely and have for years,” says Robert Tozzi, M.D., chief of pediatric cardiology at the Hackensack University Medical Center. While your body produces vitamin D from sun exposure—and you consume it in certain foods—roughly one-third of Americans don’t have sufficient levels. (Mursu’s study found that vitamin D supplementation had no effect on total mortality.) The American Heart Association recommends eating three servings of omega 3–rich fish per week, but how many of us meet that lofty goal? That’s why many experts recommend supplements. Studies show that men with the highest omega-3 levels, whether it’s from natural sources or supplements, have the lowest risk of dying of heart disease. In fact, when researchers in Italy gave 2,800 heart-attack survivors 1 g fish oil a day, they found that the supplement reduced their risk of dying of heart disease by 30 percent and of sudden cardiac death by 45 percent, compared with those who didn’t supplement their diets. That’s pretty compelling evidence.
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[...] week I posted a blog entitled Should You Stop Taking Vitamins?. In that article it pointed out some reasons why vitamins may shorten your life instead of [...]