Another Take on Food Supplements

It is called ‘supplement shock,’ this latest thing about vitamin pills.  This, after world citizens have spent zillions for decades swallowing pills that are supposed to make them healthier and therefore live longer.

Vitamin pills increase rate of mortality, says a headline of a few days back datelined London.  Research has suggested, the news says, that certain vitamin supplements could increase the risk of premature death instead of extending life.

My only problem with the news item is that it does not explain why the risk of premature death is increased or what happens to the body because of these food supplements.

Scientists of all persuasions, bless them, have made lives more comfortable these past centuries because of what they discover and invent for humankind.  It is also thanks to them and their heroic combat against diseases that human mortality rate has decreased and the average lifespan has increased.  Still and all, scientists and their discoveries continue to amaze in that what may be true and useful today may just prove the opposite by tomorrow.

Consider the wonder drug of the 1970s for menopausal women.  Those hormone replacements were de rigueur then.  Fortunes were made by the pharmaceutical industry and their spinmeisters, those advertising companies that called the attention of the world’s menopausal women who would then be enabled to possess the grace, thanks to the wonders of these drugs, to refrain from behaving like rabid dogs.

Twenty-five years later, those hormone replacement drugs were blamed as the cause of some cancers in women.  Meanwhile, women continue to rue those pinpricks of hot flashes and depressions.

Now doctors seem divided on these drugs.  I’ve been to more than one doctor and had ended up with more than one advice.  Some say these should be taken but not on a long-term basis, others say it would be best to shun these outright.

Some two decades ago, there was also the question on the food seasoning monosodium glutamate, the humble vitsin in local parlance.  It was deemed harmful, hands down.  A year after, other findings surfaced.  The seasoning is all right, but not for babies.

Time was when there were warnings about mobile phone radiations that are purportedly harmful to the human brain.  And today’s world food crisis is partially blamed on scientists who batted for biofuels but failed to see that feeding cars means feeding less people.

Now here’s this new take on vitamin supplements.  These are called supplements because they’re supposed to enhance our daily requirements of food elements and, in some instances, to make up for what we may lack in our unbalanced diets.

Food supplements are not food replacements, and one should never be mistaken for the other.  The disclaimer on some labels of bottles of vitamin supplements therefore is not there for nothing.  ‘No proven therapeutic value,’ says the standard disclaimer.

I have always been assured that excess vitamin C in the body is expelled through the urine.  Now scientists have found that vitamin C, taken to ward off colds and build resistance to other diseases, holds no promise after all.  It seems to have no positive or negative effects, the findings show.

Vitamins A and E and beta-carotene also got the axe in this scientific review.  All these supplements, collectively called antioxidants, are understood to help the body protect itself from reactive molecules called free radicals that damage the brain and other tissues.

Sixty-seven studies on more than 200 thousand people were reviewed at the Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark.  The conclusion: there is no evidence to support the claim that antioxidants reduce the risk of early death in both healthy and sick people.  What was found out instead was that ‘…people in trial groups given the antioxidants… showed increased rates of mortality,’ according to Goran Bjelakovic who carried out the review.

What’s next?  Whatever new facts are unearthed about the world and the things that man had invented, at the end of the day, the best way to go on with life is to believe in the magic of moderation, be it religion or mobile phone or vitsin or salt or sugar and spice and everything nice.  Including vitamins.

(20 April 2008)