I listened to NPR talk about this study yesterday. They explained that men taking a normal does of Vitamin E are NOT at a higher risk for prostate cancer. Men taking what they described as a "mega dose" are. The conclusion is don't take more than the recommended amount, vitamins can be harmful if you take too much. Don't do that.
More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#12[deleted]
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#13I'm sick of this hand-wavey selective nonsense. Yes, healthy people with good diets probably shouldn't be taking any vitamins, but the people I know who are this healthy are a small minority, including myself. Lets look at these cases specfically. Should women over the age of 50 take iron? Probably not, but why are they taking iron? Because they've been told their whole lives they're low on iron by their doctors, who…
I don't want to discredit your experiences, because if they work, they work, but have you considered the possibility that you're achieving a placebo effect with your supplements? In some studies, iirc, placebos have been shown to be as effective or more effective than SSRIs.
Of course, its impossible for me to run a proper experiment on myself with the study and control group of the same guy, but you are free to research the mood changing qualities of both tryptophan and vitamin D as well as fish oil on your own. Legitimate studies have found effect.
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#14I'm sick of this hand-wavey selective nonsense. Yes, healthy people with good diets probably shouldn't be taking any vitamins, but the people I know who are this healthy are a small minority, including myself. Lets look at these cases specfically. Should women over the age of 50 take iron? Probably not, but why are they taking iron? Because they've been told their whole lives they're low on iron by their doctors, who…
I don't want to discredit your experiences, because if they work, they work, but have you considered the possibility that you're achieving a placebo effect with your supplements? In some studies, iirc, placebos have been shown to be as effective or more effective than SSRIs.
In some studies, iirc, placebos have been shown to be as effective or more effective than SSRIs.
You wrote, "if I remember correctly," so I'll mention here some sources I have checked recently for other Hacker News threads. In actual practice, placebos only look effective when the statistical tests in a study are poor, and most especially when the symptoms are self-reported by patients. Placebos are NOT effective in treating actual disease states or improving "hard endpoints" such as reduction of all-cause mortality or major morbidity from specific diseases with verifiable physiological signs. See
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effect...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effect...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-placebo-ef...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effect...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/benedetti-on-p...
Placebo effects are strongest for patient self-reported subjective symptoms (classically, pain, but in more recent studies mood) and weakest for objective clinical signs measured by experienced observers. Hard endpoints to look at in the case of depression include preventing suicide and the patient returning to normal daily life function (such as full-time employment if that is appropriate for the patient's stage of life). Some hard endpoint studies indeed do not support some brands of SSRIs as well as they support cognitive-behavioral talk therapy for depression, but no properly designed study says that placebos are "effective" for any indication for SSRIs. Thanks for bringing up this issue, which is recurrent on HN, here.
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#15Good-quality commentary on the recent study announced in the article submitted here by a regular contributor to the Science-Based Medicine group blog:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vitamins-and-m...
And since it has been a while since this link has been posted in an HN comment, and since commenters here have mentioned that they haven't even read the fine submitted article, much less the underlying study publication, I'll repost here a link to a classic article by Peter Norvig (LISP hacker who is now Google's director of research) on how to interpret scientific studies and analyze study designs.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Suffice it to say that studies of human nutrition are HARD. A faultless study design would have to have dictatorial power to observe patient behavior over the long term, measuring exactly absolutely everything that a patient eats. The study design of the study reported in the submitted article is basically the best kind of study design for a longitudinal study that will pass institutional review for study of human subjects and not bankrupt the researchers with its expense. The researchers have made best current efforts to reduce flaws in the study design to the utmost extent possible, and acknowledge what they don't know (because they can't infer it from the study design) in their publications and comments to the press.
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#16So, when do I get to buy this new bestseller:
"The 4-hour 'giving you prostate cancer before your time' week"
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#17I'm sick of this hand-wavey selective nonsense. Yes, healthy people with good diets probably shouldn't be taking any vitamins, but the people I know who are this healthy are a small minority, including myself. Lets look at these cases specfically. Should women over the age of 50 take iron? Probably not, but why are they taking iron? Because they've been told their whole lives they're low on iron by their doctors, who…
Why do you say that folic acid is carcinogenic? I've found this metastudy which says we don't know:
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/18/162...
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#18I listened to NPR talk about this study yesterday. They explained that men taking a normal does of Vitamin E are NOT at a higher risk for prostate cancer. Men taking what they described as a "mega dose" are. The conclusion is don't take more than the recommended amount, vitamins can be harmful if you take too much. Don't do that.
Exactly. When starting any supplement, it's worth spending ten minutes to look up what conventional (read: conservative, which is exactly what you want here) medicine considers the maximum daily dose, side effects, overdose symptoms, and toxicity levels.
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#19It's worth noting that they're describing the effects of high doses of vitamins. Given the average modern diet (at least, for Americans like me), vitamins may be necessary to achieve "normal" doses. I take a fiber supplement (which, I know, is not a vitamin) because I try to avoid refined carbohydrates, which tends to mean I have to avoid carbohydrates altogether except when making a home-cooked meal. Since the avera…
Exactly, most vitamins are dietary supplements and not meant as wonder drugs. What the article fails to mention is the hazards of being deficient in any of these things and how easy with a modern diet it is to be deficient.
Re: More Evidence Against Vitamin Use
#20This isn't rocket science, but I am glad the research is being done. It seems obvious that eating whole foods is the best way to get your vitamins and minerals. First of all we have millions of years of consumption of whole foods, so our microbiotic gut systems are well tuned to them. Supplements are fairly new evolutionarily. The specific form of compounds is extremely important as noted here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111011112501.ht...
Maybe I am hypersensitive, but I can literally feel that there is a man-made substance in my body when I take vitamins. Just my two-cents.