Save your money on multi-vitamins

From the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter ( The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy ) the final word is save your money on those expensive multi-vitamins. This isn’t exactly breaking news, as I’ve been seeing small mentions of this before now, and already quit taking them. Tufts, however, is reporting that “the largest study ever of multimitamin use among older women has found that the pills made no significant difference in the risk of cancer, heart disease or overall mortality.”

The Tufts data is from research in the Archives of Internal Medicine, by Marian L. Neuhouser, Ph.D, of the Fred Hutchinson Research Center and colleagues. They noted that although the reasons and motivations of those who take multivitamins are wide ranging and vary greatly, fueled by product claims from the vitamin and supplement industry, yet “scientific data supporting the benefits of most supplements are lacking.”

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Still taking Vitamin E? Time to reconsider.

Researchers at UC Berkeley discovered vitamin E in 1922, and since then countless studies have been done on this still mysterious substance. Because its chief function seems to be as an antioxidant, neutralizing potentially harmful free radicals in the body, E became a superstar as the antioxidant theory of disease gained wider and wider attention. Would high doses of vitamin E prove to be the key to good health—preventing cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, as well as producing glowing skin, good eyesight, and other benefits? Studies have yielded contradictory findings, but so far the answer seems to be no.

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