VITAMIN HYPE

We love our vitamins. Half of all American adults take a multivitamin or another vitamin or mineral supplement regularly. And 70 percent of people who are 65 or older take them. That amounts to more than $12 billion per year. According to Johns Hopkins, that money might be better spent on real sources of vitamins such as fruits, vegetables, healthy carbohydrates, and dairy products. In a 2013 editorial in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine titled “Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements,” Johns Hopkins researchers reviewed the data, homing in on three particularly alarming studies. One was an analysis of research involving 450,000 people, finding that multivitamins did not lower risk for cancer or heart disease. Another tracked multivitamin use of 5,947 men and their mental functioning over 12 years and found that multivitamins did not reduce risk for mental declines such as slowed thinking or memory loss. The third was a study of 1,708 heart attack survivors who were randomly split into two groups. For up to five years, one group took a high-dose multivitamin and minerals and the other took a placebo (the patients, the physicians caring for them, and study personnel did not know who was receiving a placebo or multivitamin-and-mineral pills). Rates of heart attacks, heart surgeries, and deaths later on were similar in the two groups.

What’s more, two other prominent studies spanning more than a decade, completed in 1995 and following tens of thousands of people, showed that beta-carotene and vitamin E supplementation in particular can be downright harmful, significantly increasing the risk