Vitamin Caveat

We all know at least one person who constantly pops handfuls of vitamin tablets.  I always feel both curious about and wary of these peoples' daily health rituals:  

Am I missing something wonderful?  

Of course not, they're a money-wasting load of bull.

The vitamins look so shiny and colorful, and they're all natural!  

You're a trained professional.  You know those things are put out by snake-oil salesmen.  Plus they're absurdly expensive!

Look at the pretty bottles they come in...

I NEED FIVE BOTTLES OF THE RELAXATION / ENERGY / POTENCY / CALMING / JOINT RELIEF / ANTI-INFLAMMATION /  MUSCLE TONIC FORMULA, AND I NEED IT NOW!

I went through a pill-popping period once.  About 12 years ago my wife picked up one of Andrew Weil's books and we started taking enough pills for an octogenarian.  

Did I feel better?  These things are so hard to gauge, because I felt fine before that.  I told myself that the idea was prevention, but my reptile-brain just doesn't compute that very well when it comes to pill-popping.  Exercise, yes.  The eating of whole foods, yes.  But somehow not vitamins.

If I'm paying two hundred bucks a month for the pills, then, yes, I'm going to say that I feel better on the pills.  But after half a year or so, when I suddenly found myself not paying two hundred bucks a month for pills, I definitely felt better, and hunted around for studies that debunked the taking of vitamins.

That's a flip approach, but I imagine that deep down, most people are, like me, instant gratification junkies.  Supplement-wise, I've now got it down to three: green tea (not really a supplement), fish oil, and protein powder.  With the possible exception of the  fish oil, I can feel them all working.  Ask me in a year what I'm taking and fish oil will be the most likely to go--despite all the hype. 

I thought about all this recently because Tara Pope-Parker has an interesting piece in the New York Times about a study about the effects of Vitamin E and Selenium supplementation on incidence of prostate cancer.  According to the piece,

The SELECT trial, which stands for the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial, was studying whether selenium and vitamin E, either alone or in combination, could lower a man’s risk for prostate cancer. More than 35,000 men were taking part...

But the National Cancer Institute announced Monday that the trial, which was scheduled to end in 2011 after seven years, is being halted early. A review of the data shows no benefit in using the supplements to prevent prostate cancer. In addition, slightly more users of vitamin E were getting prostate cancer, and slightly more selenium-only users were developing diabetes.

Researchers initiated the study because preliminary results from other studies suggested that taking the supplements may contribute to lowering prostate cancer risk.  

Now I've been an herbal-remedy / vitamin guy from time to time, and I understand the argument that there are almost certainly effective treatments out there which the AMA has yet to discover or approve.  But the results of a study like this are a point in the "caution" column when it comes to medicating with vitamins and other supplements. 

As we've hopefully learned by now, "all natural" doesn't mean "all safe."  If we believe--and I do, at least theoretically--that vitamins and other remedies can have potent therapeutic benefits which equal or exceed the benefits of pharmaceutical drugs, then it stands to reason that such remedies can have the same kinds of detrimental side effects we see in traditional drugs as well.  

Caveat emptor, my friends.