Jon Barron's Natural Health Blog

A new study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has found thatvitamins C and E are useless in preventing coronary events. In fact, the results indicated that taking vitamin E might increase the risk of bleeding strokes, a finding duplicated in an earlier study of male smokers. The large-scale study followed almost 15,000 male physicians for 10 years. Some of the subjects took vitamin E alone, some took C alone, some took both supplements, and some took only placebos. At the conclusion of the study, according to researcher Howard D. Sesso, ScD, of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, "We saw no effect for either vitamin E or C [for]… men with a low initial risk for cardiovascular disease."

According to an AP news release, researcher Barbara Howard said the results "were so clear that they would be unlikely to change if the study were done in women, minorities, or with different formulations of the vitamins. " And Web MD notes that this research represents "one of the most rigorously designed trials to ever address the issue."

Well if this research represents one of the most rigorous trials ever, we consumers have little reason to trust the health intelligence that gets passed on to us by the medical mainstream. Why? Because like so many vitamin C and E trials that have come before, this study absolutely misses the point.

Look carefully at what it says about the study design in the JAMA article: "The [study] was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2×2x2×2 factorial trial evaluating the balance of risks and benefits of vitamin E (400 IU synthetic alpha-tocopherol or its placebo every other day; BASF Corporation, Florham Park, New Jersey), vitamin C (500 mg synthetic ascorbic acid or its placebo daily; BASF Corporation), and a multivitamin (Centrum Silver or its placebo) daily."

Ah! The broken link appears right there, in the first sentence — the researchers used a synthetic isolate form of vitamin E, and they only used 500 mg of vitamin C, and they used Centrum Silver, one of the lowest common denominator supplements in the world. As I’ve written many times before, the synthetic form of alpha tocopherol is at best only 30 percent as effective as the naturally occurring form. Even more, vitamin E, like all vitamins, appears as a complex in nature, not as isolated alpha tocopherol. In fact, vitamin E consists of at least four tocopherols (alpha, beta, gamma, and delta) and four tocotrienols (alpha, beta, gamma, and delta). As it turns out, alpha tocopherol is one of the least important elements in the vitamin E complex — with four other components being far more effective. In any event, taking E in its natural, complete complex form is essential in order to experience benefits from it. It’s somewhat remarkable that these researchers chose to ignore this fact and instead delivered alpha tocopherol to subjects, given that the knowledge is out there.

And then there’s the vitamin C issue. When Linus Pauling did his research, he had patients taking 1000 mg a day of vitamin C. This study only allowed 500 mg daily. Bottom line: if you’re looking to evaluate the efficacy of vitamin C according to previously published studies, you have to use the same dose. Using less is like doing a study on the value of surgery to remove tumors and deciding to conduct the study by removing only 50% of every tumor encountered. The results are likely to be less than encouraging.

So what’s the reasoning behind this faulty design? The researchers apparently thought it didn’t matter what form of E subjects took, and they also concluded that the subjects could tolerate no more than 500 mg of C daily. That type of thinking is a bit like saying it doesn’t matter if you put low-test gas in your Jaguar engine, and that it doesn’t matter if you add only half the amount of yeast called for when you bake bread. In the first case the car won’t make it into town, and the second only works when you’re trying to make matzoh for Passover. Likewise, if you want subjects to benefit from supplements, you need to give them the correct form in effective doses. Otherwise, the results are useless — as are these.

:hc

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 7:47 am and is filed under Chronic Illness, Diet and Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.