If you happened to watch the news, read a newspaper, or visit an online news service last night, you may have caught one or both of the stories about vitamins being bad for you.
Let me first start off this very important topic with one thought: Sickness is BIG business. The profits surrounding treating people’s sicknesses are astronomical compared to the wellness industry. As with any news organization, the more captivating the headline, the scarier it is and the more attention it receives. The headlines yesterday about multivitamins increasing mortality never mentioned many details and glaring flaws of the study, or that this study showed just a 2.4% increase. And in the vitamin E prostate cancer risk story, they neglect to mention a synthetic form of vitamin E was used. Now, some vitamins function identically in the body whether they’re natural or synthetic, but vitamin E is not one of them. Virtually every health professional knows this fact… yet it wasn’t discussed, just that vitamin E was bad. This point really hit home when my wife said after watching the news that I better take vitamin E out of the Vemma formula.
Naturally, since my entire family takes Vemma, I wanted Dr. Wang, our Chief Science Officer, to “peel back the onion” a bit on these two hot topics and give me a few details in language I can understand and pass on to you. Here are a few points of interest, along with an article that puts the multivitamin “observational study” into proper perspective (An observational study simply means the participants filled out a survey and self-reported their diet, lifestyle and supplement use, which leaves room for the possibility of reporting errors. This is not a clinical study like the Gold Standard we’ve performed on Vemma, which I’ll talk about more in a minute).
• The study featured a majority of white, post-menopausal females living in rural areas, which doesn't necessarily translate into a typical urban lifestyle or diet.
• Many of these ladies increased their usage of supplements over the course of the study, and researchers cannot exclude the possibility that this increase may have been in response to health challenges that could have contributed to an overall risk of mortality. (Keep in mind that this study only showed a difference of increasing mortality of 2.4%, which many experts believe to be not clinically significant).
• Many of the self-reported supplement users were also on hormone-replacement therapy, which itself has an increased association with mortality.
• In the prostate study, ONLY the group supplementing with 400 IU’s (international units) of synthetic vitamin E saw the increase. For some reason, the group that combined both synthetic vitamin E and the mineral selenium saw no change. (FYI: Vemma contains 60 IU’s of natural vitamin E combined with selenium.)
Vemma is a multi-dimensional wellness and clinically studied formula. Our two Gold Standard, 60-person, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical studies rely on blood draws and thorough analysis of the data of not only the Vemma formula group, but also a placebo (fake) formula group. The double-blind part means the participants didn’t know what version they were taking, which is one reason why results from a clinical study far outweigh the surveys filled out in an observational study. Our two studies showed the Vemma formula significantly boosted immune function, significantly decreased CRP (inflammation) and increased antioxidant levels by 18% within two hours, and kept them saturated for 6 hours (blood draws were done at 0, 2, 4 and 6 hour marks). It’s upsetting to me that the press made no mention of the difference in studies leading people to believe the final results would have comparable merit.
Although our belief and support of vitamin supplementation based on the sound science available has not wavered, Vemma shouldn't be classified solely as a multivitamin. Phytonutrients and glyconutrients, those plant-based compounds from the superfruit mangosteen, green tea and aloe vera, dominate the contents of this formula as well as our 65+ plant-based minerals. The copper and iron minerals used in the mortality study were elemental … a huge difference to plant-based minerals! Our full-spectrum vitamin blend makes up only a small part of a sound overall wellness strategy, and numerous positive studies have confirmed beneficial properties of vitamins. In my mind, one or two studies with very questionable protocols won't get me to stop giving my family Vemma. I've heard too many great stories, and I have seen too many tremendous results.
It’s interesting that one of the study's authors advises that vitamins "be used with a strong medically based cause;" in other words, when you get sick, you should take them. To me, that’s like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out! Here's what I know: Your body needs minerals. Ninety-five percent of your body's daily functions are mineral-dependent. Your body can't make minerals; your body also needs antioxidants, phytonutrients and glyconutrients. It needs way more vitamin D3 than you can get drinking milk. So that leaves you two options: Eat foods that you know are rich in the 65+ minerals every day, along with foods rich in vitamins and phytonutrients. And while you're at it, get your kids to eat those foods every day, and somehow track it so you make sure you're all getting enough every day...or take a shot of Vemma.
The lack of details provided in the media regarding these extremely important topics frankly amazes me! People trust news sources, and for them to be blindly led astray like this is shocking. Most people will never be exposed to the truth behind these details, and will live their life and make their families’ health decisions based on these headlines and 3-minute news stories. It would appear that these studies were done to serve the interests of other industries … but I'm concerned about your families' interests! I'm going to do my best and use every influential contact I have to make sure light is shed on this critical issue and help the public learn the real facts about supplementation.
So here's what I need your help to do: Please help me get the word out. To start with, please share this information, post and tweet my blog to people you care about. I can’t hope to make a dent without the help of people that care.
The bottom line to all this is that I hope people have realized that they don't always eat right, and the nutritional content of fruits and vegetables has dropped considerably over just the last 20 to 25 years. Hopefully, some observational study won't convince them otherwise. We know processed foods, fast foods and the average person’s diet in general leaves nutritional gaps only supplementing can fill. If I were making a decision for my family, I'd never let them take a vitamin pill … but I sure would give them Vemma everyday! In today's environment, you can't afford to get sick, and supplementation is the best wellness insurance I can think of.
Stay healthy, stay strong!
BK
PS. Wait till you read this from http://www.anh-usa.org/shame-on-ama-archives-of-internal-medicine
Shame on AMA’s Archives of Internal Medicine!
October 11, 2011
Did you hear the breaking news last night—that multivitamins may shorten your life? Here’s how junk science from the AMA set off the media frenzy.
Bloomberg phrased it this way: “Multivitamins and some dietary supplements, used regularly by an estimated 234 million US adults, may do more harm than good, according to a study that tied their use to higher death rates among older women.” The study’s authors outrageously concluded, “We see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements.”
The study, published in the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Archives of Internal Medicine,assessed the use of vitamin and mineral supplements in nearly 39,000 women whose average age was 62. The researchers asked the women to fill out three surveys, the first in 1986, the second in 1997, and the last in 2004, reporting what supplements they took and what foods they ate, and answering a few questions about their health.
That’s right, all the data was self-reported by the study subjects only three times over the course of the 19-year-long study. To say the data is “unreliable” would be a generous description. This kind of “data” has no place in a valid scientific study.
Then the researchers looked at how many of the women had died by 2008. They reported that the number of deaths were somewhat higher for women who took copper, a little bit lower for women who took calcium, but about average for most of the women.
In the study, all of the relative risks were so low as to be statistically insignificant, and none was backed up by any medical investigation or biological plausibility study. No analysis was done on what combinations of vitamins and minerals were actually consumed, and no analysis of the cause of death was done beyond grouping for “cancer,” “cardiovascular disease,” or “other”—there was certainly no causative analysis done. The interactions of potential compounding risk factors is always tremendously complex—and was ignored in this so-called study.
“Multivitamin” can mean many different things, and of course changed tremendously over the 19 years during which this “study” was conducted. Were they high quality? Were the ingredients synthetic or natural? How much of each nutrient was taken? Were they really taken at all? How good is anyone’s memory in describing what took place over many years? One would assume that that the women’s diets fluctuated greatly over the same period; when self-reporting only three times in 19 years, there is a great deal of information one would naturally leave out even if some of it was accurate. No analysis was done of the effect of supplements on the women’s overall health, nor of their effect on women of other ages.
In short, this study is less than useless: it is dangerous, because it is being used by the media and the mainstream medical establishment to blacken the eye of nutritional supplements using poor data, bad analysis, and specious conclusions—otherwise known as junk science.
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