Why Take Vitamin Food Supplements?

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Why Take Vitamin Food Supplements?

 

 

CAN SUPPLEMENTS TAKE THE PLACE OF A BAD DIET?

 

by Andrew W. Saul

 

(Reprinted with permission from the Journal of

Orthomolecular Medicine, 2003; Vol. 18, Numbers 3 and

4, p. 213-216.)

 

Can supplements take the place of a bad diet?

 

They'd better.

 

In spite of decades of intense and well-funded mass

education, " 70 percent of all adults and children in

the U.S. do not eat the recommended five to nine

servings of fruits and vegetables a day for good

health, " according to an April 25, 2002 press release

by the National Cancer Institute. (1) And when a

" serving " of fruit may be a 6-ounce glass of juice and

a " serving " of a vegetable is a mere half-cup of

beans, it really makes you think.

 

Since at least half of all Americans take vitamin

supplements every day, one might be tempted to say

that, to a considerable degree, the people have

already answered this article's title's question. The

public now, finally, has the support of orthodox

medicine. After years of disparaging supplements, the

Journal of the American Medical Association has

recently published the recommendation that every

person take a multivitamin daily (2,3), saying that

" (S)uboptimal intake of some vitamins, above levels

causing classic vitamin deficiency, is a risk factor

for chronic diseases and common in the general

population, especially the elderly. " Therefore, JAMA's

intent goes beyond routine nutritional insurance for

widespread bad-to-borderline diets. The goal is stated

in the article's title: Vitamins for chronic disease

prevention in adults. It is a sensible idea whose time

should have come generations ago.

 

Supplementation's harshest critics have traditionally

railed against vitamins (especially in large doses) as

being outright " dangerous " and at the very least " a

waste of money. " Even as late as this year, the New

York Times (4) expanded the attack to question folic

acid supplementation and even the practice of taking a

daily multivitamin, saying, " vitamin supplements

cannot correct for a poor diet (and that)

multivitamins have not been shown to prevent any

disease. "

 

The NY Times may have neglected to emphasize the real

story: people eat terribly.

 

Though eating less fat, more Westerners are more obese

than ever before, and in the United States, an

astounding 80% of persons over the age of 25 are

overweight. Nearly two-thirds of all Americans (more

than 120 million people) are overweight or obese,

according to the 1999-2000 National Health and

Nutrition Examination. (5) Protein and sugar intake is

still astronomically high and fruit and vegetable

consumption is still ridiculously low.

 

While vitamin supplements do not produce weight loss,

persons trying to lose weight face a nutritional

adequacy problem of their own. Approximately 50

million Americans admit to being " on a diet " at any

given time. Virtually all popular unsupplemented

weight loss plans are nutrient deficient. For many,

eating less food means eating fewer food-source

vitamins. Taking supplements can be seen as especially

important for all people that are dieting.

 

Dieticians have set themselves the heroic but probably

unattainable goal of getting every person to eat well

every day. Even if obtained, such vitamin intake as

good diet provides is inadequate to maintain optimum

health for everyday people in real-life situations.

Tens of millions of women have a special concern. Oral

contraceptives lower serum levels of B-vitamins,

especially B-6, plus niacin (B-3), thiamin (B-1),

riboflavin (B-2), folic acid, vitamin C and B-12. (6).

Ladies, when is the last time your physician

instructed you to be sure to take supplemental vitamin

C and B-complex vitamins as long as you are on the

Pill?

 

Furthermore, government vitamin recommendations are so

low as to resemble a test so easy, a standard so

minimal, that you would think no one can possibly

fail. For example, the US Reference Daily Intake (RDI)

for vitamin E is 30 International Units. It is widely

appreciated that at least 100 IU of vitamin E (and

probably 400 IU or more) daily is required to prevent

a great deal of cardiovascular and other disease. Yet

it is literally impossible to obtain 100 IU of vitamin

E from even the most perfectly planned diet.

 

To demonstrate this, I've challenged my nutrition

students to create a few days of " balanced " meals,

using the food composition tables in any nutrition

textbook, to achieve 100 IU of vitamin E per day. They

could attempt their objective with any combination of

foods and any plausible number of portions of each

food. The only limitation was that they had to design

meals that a person would actually be willing to eat.

As this ruled out prescribing whole grains by the

pound and vegetable oils by the cup, they could not do

it. Nor can the general public. Most people do not

even get 30 IU of vitamin E a day. In fact, most get

only 17 IU. (7)

 

" Supplements " by definition are designed to fill

nutritional gaps in a bad diet. They fill in what may

be surprisingly large gaps in a good diet as well. In

the case of vitamin E, doing so is likely to save

millions of lives. The New England Journal of Medicine

had two articles in the May 20, 1993 issue (8,9)

showing that persons taking vitamin E supplements had

an approximately 40% reduction in cardiovascular

disease. Nearly 40,000 men and 87,000 women took part

in the studies. The more vitamin E they took, and the

longer they took it, the less cardiovascular disease

they experienced.

 

A 1996 double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 2,002

patients with clogged arteries demonstrated a 77%

decreased risk of heart attack in those taking 400 to

800 IU of vitamin E. (10) Again, such effective

quantities of vitamin E positively cannot be obtained

from diet alone. 800 IU is 2,667% of the US RDI for

vitamin E. Is that a lot, or is the government

recommendation too low?

 

Even a modest quantity of vitamin C prevents disease

and saves lives. Just 500 mg daily results in a 42

percent lower risk of death from heart disease and a

35 percent lower risk of death from any cause. (11)

Since two-thirds of the population is not eating

sufficient fruits and vegetables, the only way to

close the gap is with vitamin supplements.

 

To illustrate how extraordinarily important

supplements are to persons with a questionable diet,

consider this: Children who eat hot dogs once a week

double their risk of a brain tumor. Kids eating more

than twelve hot dogs a month (that's barely three hot

dogs a week) have nearly ten times the risk of

leukemia as children who ate none. (12) However,

hot-dog eating children taking supplemental vitamins

were shown to have a reduced risk of cancer. (13) It

is curious that, while theorizing many " potential "

dangers of vitamins, the media often choose to ignore

the very real cancer-prevention benefits of

supplementation.

 

Critics also fail to point out how economical

supplements are. For low-income households, taking a

two-cent vitamin C tablet and a three-cent

multivitamin, readily obtainable from any Wal-Mart or

discount store, is vastly cheaper than getting those

vitamins by eating right. The uncomfortable truth is

that it is often less expensive to supplement than to

buy nutritious food, especially out-of-season fresh

produce. And those who wish to follow Linus Pauling's

perennially wise recommendation to take daily

multi-gram doses of vitamin C can do so easily and

cheaply. Few people can afford to eat several dozen

oranges a day.

 

Since the ancient Egyptians, through the time of

Hippocrates, and right up to the present, poor diet

has been described and decried by physicians. Little

has changed for the better, and much has changed for

the worse. Though nutritionists place a nearly

Puritanical emphasis on food selection as our vitamin

source, everyone else eats because they are hungry,

because it makes them feel better, and because it

gives such hedonistic pleasure. No one likes the " food

police. " Telling people what they should do is rarely

an unqualified success, and with something as

intensely personal as food, well, good luck. We could,

of course, legislate Good Food Laws and make it

against the law to make, sell, or eat junk. That is as

likely to work as Prohibition. It presents me with

novel images of seven-year-olds bootlegging Kool-Aid

and their parents running Twinkies across state lines.

 

Our somewhat less draconian choice of " noble

experiment " has been to educate, to implore, and to

exhort the citizenry to be " choosy chewers, " to " eat a

balanced diet " and follow the food groups charts. The

result? Obesity is more prevalent and cancer is no

less prevalent. Cardiovascular disease is still the

number one killer of men and women. " Health is the

fastest growing failing business in western

civilization, " writes Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., in

Human Health and Homeostasis. (14) " We can say with

reasonable certainty that only about six percent of

the adult population can qualify as 'clinically'

healthy. " (p 9) We can try to sort out each of the

many negative behavior variables (such as smoking)

which certainly must be factored in. When we have done

so, we are left with the completely unavoidable

conclusion that our dinner tables are killing us.

 

The good diet vs. supplement controversy may be

reduced to four logical choices:

 

a) Shall we eat right and take supplements and be

healthy?

 

b) Or, shall we eat right and take no supplements, be

vitamin E and C deficient for our entire lifespan, and

greatly increase our risk of sickness and death at any

age?

 

c) Or, shall we eat wrong and take no supplements, and

be even worse off?

 

d) Or, shall we eat wrong, but take daily vitamin

supplements, and be a lot less sickly than if we did

not take supplements?

 

While each of these four options constitutes a popular

choice, there is one best health-promoting conclusion:

Supplements make any dietary lifestyle, whether good

or bad, significantly better. Supplements are an easy,

practical entry-level better-nutrition solution for

the public. A television-educated populace is more

likely to take some tablets than to eat organ meats,

wheat germ, bean sprouts and ample vegetables. Media

supplement-scare-stories notwithstanding, taking

supplements is not the problem; it is a solution.

Malnutrition is the problem.

 

In 1998, the American Association of Poison Control

Centers' Toxic Exposure Surveillance System reported

the following fatalities from vitamin supplements:

 

Adult multiple vitamins: 0

 

Pediatric multiple vitamins: 0

 

(And, incidentally, there were no deaths from vitamin

C, vitamin E, folic acid, nor from any other vitamin

whatsoever.) (15)

 

On the other hand, according to David DeRose, M.D.,

M.P.H., " 300,000 Americans die annually from poor

nutrition choices. " (16)

 

As it has been for thousands of years of human

history, so the malnutrition problem remains with us

today. Only in the last century have supplements even

been available. Their continued use represents a true

public health breakthrough on a par with clean

drinking water and sanitary sewers, and can be

expected to save as many lives. But as long as USDA

Food Stamps may be used to buy a box of doughnuts, but

are not allowed by law to be used to buy

multivitamins, there is a task in front of us. Vitamin

supplements, like air bags, can save lives. We should

advocate them without ceasing.

 

References:

 

1.

http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2002pres/20020425.html

 

2. Fletcher RH and Fairfield KM. Vitamins for Chronic

Disease Prevention in Adults: Clinical Applications

JAMA. 2002; 287:3127-3129.

 

3. Fairfield KM and Fletcher RH. Vitamins for Chronic

Disease Prevention in Adults: Scientific Review JAMA.

2002; 287:3116-3126.

 

4. Kolata G. Vitamins: More may be too many. The New

York Times. April 29, 2003.

 

5. Flegal KM, Carroll MD, Ogden CL, Johnson CL.

Prevalence and trends in obesity among US adults,

1999-2000. JAMA. 2002 Oct 9; 288(14):1723-7.

 

6. Wynn V. Vitamins and oral contraceptive use.

Lancet. 1975 Mar 8;1(7906):561-4.

 

7. Antioxidants: What they are and what they do.

Harvard Health Letter. Feb 1999; 24(5).

 

8. Stampfer MJ, Hennekens CH, Manson, J., Colditz GA,

Rosner B. and Willett, WC. (1993) Vitamin E

consumption and the risk of coronary disease in women.

New England Journal of Medicine. 328:1444-1449.

 

9. Rimm EB, Stampfer, MJ, Ascherio A, Giovannucci E,

Colditz, GA and Willett WC. (1993) Vitamin E

consumption and the risk of coronary heart disease in

men. New England Journal of Medicine 328:1450-1456.

 

10. Stephens, NG et al. Randomized controlled trial of

vitamin E in patients with coronary artery disease:

Cambridge Heart Antioxidant Study (CHAOS), " The

Lancet, March 23, 1996; 347:781-786.

 

11. Enstrom JE, Kanim LE, and Klein MA. Vitamin C

intake and mortality among a sample of the United

States population. Epidemiology 3 (1992):194–202.

 

12. Peters JM, Preston-Martin S, London SJ, Bowman JD,

Buckley JD, Thomas DC. Processed meats and risk of

childhood leukemia (California, USA). Cancer Causes

Control. 1994 Mar; 5(2):195-202.

 

13. Sarasua S, Savitz DA. Cured and broiled meat

consumption in relation to childhood cancer: Denver,

Colorado (United States). Cancer Causes Control. 1994

Mar; 5(2):141-8.

 

14. Cheraskin E. Human Health and Homeostasis. 1999.

Birmingham, AL: Natural Reader Press.

 

15. Rosenbloom M. Vitamin toxicity.

http://www.eMedicine.com . October 23, 2001.

 

16. DeRose DJ. The WellnessWise Electronic Journal.

Vol 1, No. 8; September 3, 1995.

http://www.lifetalk.net/anewstart/wellnesswise/ww_95sep03.html