The truth behind the headlines about antioxidants and vitamins

[Guest guest]

The truth behind the headlines about antioxidants and vitamins

Wednesday, June 04, 2008 by: Mike

http://www.naturalnews.com/023357.html

(NaturalNews) If you've been reading the health headlines in the mainstream

media recently, you might have come to the conclusion that vitamins are the most

dangerous thing you could possibly consume. Headlines declare antioxidants to be

useless, vitamin C to be dangerous and vitamin E to be deadly! Nutrition, it

seems, is suddenly under attack by the mainstream media, and if you believe all

the headlines, you should probably flee from dietary supplements and start

chugging prescription drugs as quickly as possible.

But what's really behind these scare tactics, and is there any real science

backing the headlines appearing in the popular press? To answer this question,

consider one highly-publicized example of a large antioxidant study (vitamins E

and C) in women. A nine-year study followed more than 8,000 women to determine

the effects of antioxidants in preventing heart disease. The study found a

significant reduction in stroke (31 percent reduction) and heart attacks (22

percent) among those women who actually took the vitamins. But if you consider

all the women who originally signed up for the study -- including those

thousands who never took the vitamins -- it turns out the results show nothing

substantial.

This all comes down to common sense. Of course you're not going to see positive

results in women who didn't take the vitamins; nor would you see results from

anything else (a drug, an herb, etc.) if the women didn't actually take that

substance. And yet the mass media stories about the study all declare

antioxidants to be useless because they are considering the measured results of

all the women who didn't take the antioxidants. It's like taking a hundred cars

that ran out of gas, filling up 40 of them with gasoline, then declaring that

gasoline doesn't make cars run because 60 of them are still on empty.

It sounds absurd, I know, but it's only the beginning of this story: Time after

time, medical researchers and the mainstream media seem to go out of their way

to distort scientific studies and misinform readers about the usefulness of

vitamins and dietary supplements.

Vitamin E will kill you! (And other media lies)

Another study publicized last year declared that vitamin E was deadly and would

kill you with heart attacks and strokes. This particular meta-data analysis was

based on synthetic vitamin E (a completely unnatural chemical made from

petroleum derivatives), not the natural vitamin E that appears in nature.

Furthermore, many of the study subjects were elderly patients suffering from

heart disease, putting them at high risk for heart attacks from day one. When

these patients started to die during the study, researchers declared, " The

vitamin E killed them! "

Researchers also went to great lengths to cherry-pick studies that showed

negative results for vitamin E, tossing out all the studies that showed positive

results. This kind of subjective inclusion of clinical trials in a meta analysis

is a classic sign of scientific fraud.

I know what you're thinking: Researchers are smarter than that. They wouldn't be

so foolish as to count the results of people who didn't take the vitamins, or

give supplements to the near-dead and blame their deaths on the supplements. But

you might be assuming these researchers are operating with ethics in the first

place, and experience tells us they're not. Many are recipients of hundreds of

thousands of dollars in grants offered to them by drug companies. Their primary

research (and revenue source) involves studying the effects of pharmaceuticals.

Researchers who don't consistently " discover " positive effects for

pharmaceuticals are eventually blackballed from the industry and find themselves

jobless and unemployable. There's a tremendous amount of pressure applied to

researchers to make sure they uncover findings that support the financial

interests of the drug companies. Eight percent of all clinical trials funded by

drug companies produce results that are favorable to the financial interests of

those companies.

Similarly, there is also a lot of pressure to find something wrong with dietary

supplements, herbs and nutrition -- precisely because such substances compete

with pharmaceuticals. The more consumers take nutritional supplements, the less

they need pharmaceuticals (because nutrition actually prevents disease and keeps

you healthy), so one of the key ways to ensure a strong future market for

pharmaceuticals is to discredit nutritional supplements and make people believe

they're somehow dangerous.

The danger of pharmaceuticals

This is all quite laughable, given that prescription drugs are now the 4rd

leading cause of death in America. FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are killing at

least 100,000 Americans a year right now, and just one diabetes drug recently

scrutinized for its health effects was reported by Dr. Graham, a senior

FDA drug safety researcher, to have likely killed more than 80,000 Americans!

That's more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War, and this is from but

one drug.

Almost nothing is killing Americans faster than prescription drugs: Not

terrorists, not war, not chemicals in the food, car accidents or drunk driving.

Only cancer and strokes kill more Americans, and even in those cases, death is

accelerated by the side effects of the pharmaceuticals used to treat those

diseases (chemotherapy is especially toxic and causes tremendous harm to the

liver, kidneys and brain). Pharmaceuticals are so universally dangerous to the

health and safety of Americans that if they were herbs, they would have all been

outlawed years ago.

And yet the mainstream media tries to distract the public and get people to

focus on the dangers of vitamins instead. Vitamins have killed no one. No one

ever died from taking natural vitamin E, or eating superfoods or ingesting

vitamin-rich berries. In fact, nutritional supplements and superfoods greatly

enhance human health, protecting you from disease and greatly reducing your risk

of cancer, heart disease, depression, diabetes, obesity and many other common

diseases.

It is a curious sign of the times that the mainstream media, which receives

billions of dollars in advertising from drug companies, now finds itself in the

business if misinforming Americans, trying to convince them that day is night,

up is down, and nutrition is dangerous. War is peace, ignorance is strength and

freedom is tyranny. It's right out of the book 1984 by Orwell, and sadly,

it has become reality with the mainstream media today.

So don't be suckered by the headlines. Be a skeptical thinker, and consider

who's funding these skewed studies that somehow keep inventing dangers

associated with herbs or dietary supplements. Herbs, vitamins and superfoods are

astonishingly safe, and yet pharmaceuticals are so dangerous that each year,

they kill more Americans than would fit in a superbowl football stadium. Where's

the news about all those deaths? Nowhere to be found. There are profits to

protect and markets to defend. The people have to be kept ignorant of the true

causes of health -- and taught to fear nutrition -- in order to keep the Big

Pharma racket profitably rolling along.

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About the author: Mike is a consumer health advocate with a mission to

teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than

1,500 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health

topics, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are

experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. is a

trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees

whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2007, launched

EcoLEDs, a maker of energy efficient LED lights that greatly reduce CO2

emissions. He's also the founder of a well known HTML email software company

whose 'Email Marketing Director' software currently runs the NaturalNews

subscription database. also serves as the executive director of the

Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and regularly

pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates.