Studies on Vit E, C, Beta Carotene and Cancer

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PHS-II: Vitamins E, C, Beta Carotene, and Cancer

PHS-II: Vitamins E, C, Beta Carotene, and Cancer

Date: 11/24/2008

Posted By: Jon Barron

What

is it about vitamin E that seems to bring out the worst in medical

researchers? Once again, I find myself compelled to defend it -- for

the umpteenth time. My goodness, there have been three studies in the

last month alone "proving" that vitamin E offers no health benefits. First, health findings from the Physician's Health Study II (PHS-II) on

vitamin E and vitamin C in terms of preventing cardiovascular disease

were released last week. In case you missed the news, which was widely

promoted in the media, according to the study,

neither vitamin E nor vitamin C supplementation reduced the risk of

major cardiovascular events, and that there was no support for the use

of these supplements for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in

middle-aged and older men. These results are, of course, nonsense, and I dealt with them in my blog last week.

Then there was the SELECT study on vitamin E and prostate cancer

released earlier this month that my good friend, Mike at Natural

News, did a great job of eviscerating.

Which leaves the third study (actually, the PHS-II study once again but

involving different data, a different conclusion, and a brand new

release), which found that the use of vitamin E or C supplementation

provides no benefit in terms of cancer prevention. What is it about

vitamin E that brings out the worst in so called intelligent people? In

any case, this conclusion, too, is nonsense -- and for many of the same

reasons as the other two studies. But since the media has promoted this

nonsense on three separate occasions in the last month, I will deal

with it once again in some detail in this newsletter.

The Physicians' Health Study-II (PHS-II)

Let's begin by taking a look at PHS-II. The Physicians' Health Study-II

was designed to test four popular nutrients -- vitamin C, vitamin E,

beta-carotene, and a multivitamin -- primarily for their effectiveness

in preventing cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer, and total

cancer. Certainly, this was an admirable goal that no reasonable person

could quibble with. Participants were recruited from physicians who had

already participated in PHS-I,

which was used to determine if aspirin and beta carotene could prevent

heart attacks and other cardiovascular events. The reason physicians

were chosen for these studies is that it was reasoned that, as a group,

physicians would report their medical histories and health status more

accurately than participants drawn from a general population. Also, it

was determined that they would be more likely to identify possible side

effects of the study agents. Incidentally, the results of PHS-I were

that aspirin significantly reduced the risk of a first heart attack and

that beta carotene had no effect.

The first warning sign that PHS-II was designed to fail

So

far, nothing to complain about. PHS-II sounds like a reasonable attempt

to determine a reasonable health benefit for some natural supplements.

As if! The first warning sign was listed in the study recruitment guidelines . "To take part in PHS-II, men who were taking individual supplements containing more than 100% of the RDA

of vitamin E, vitamin C, beta-carotene, or a multivitamin had to forego

the use of such supplements for the course of the trial." This

requirement is utter nonsense. RDAs are set increbibly low.

They are actually estimates, based on surprisingly limited studies,

often involving small numbers of people and incomplete data. They are

designed to prevent the immediate onset of disease (scurvey, rickets,

etc.); they play no role in maintaining long term health and preventing

long term chronic illness. Yes, I understand why medical researchers

keep insisting on it -- but it absolutely turns the concept of

alternative health treatments on its head and pretty much negates any

positive results before you even start. Why?

I've actually covered this issue many times before, but since it involves one of my favorite metaphors, let me repeat.

In almost all cases, alternative therapies for cancer are administered

as part of a comprehensive program or protocol. Nevertheless, when

members of the medical community decide to test the validity of a

particular treatment, they insist on separating out the pieces from the

whole and testing them in isolation. Thus they feel the need, as in

PHS-II, to stop the test subjects from using any other supplements at

anything beyond ridiculously low RDA levels so those other nutrients

would have no impact on the study results.

Although

this may at first appear to be reasonable and "scientific," it is not.

In fact, it is akin to deciding to test a prospective football

quarterback by putting him on the field with no one else playing

offense. The "alternative approach," of course, would be to put him on

the field with an entire team and see how he plays. If he scores, if he

leads the team to victory, if he wins the Super Bowl, we would say he

is a good quarterback. To many people, that would seem to make sense --

unfortunately, not to anyone in the medical community.

The

"medical approach," on the other hand, is quite different. "How can we

really tell if he's any good if there are other players on the field?

Great receivers could catch lousy passes, and we'd never know. A great

offensive line could make our quarterback look good by blocking so well

that he has all the time in the world to find his receivers. No! The

only way to truly tell if he's any good is to put him on the field

alone against an entire all-pro defensive team, and then see how he

does." And, of course, the moment the ball is hiked, he's swarmed over

and killed.

So far, so good; but we have a hanging chad

that needs to be dealt with. And that is that drugs pass this kind of

testing. How do they do it? Quite simply, drugs are "magic bullets."

Returning to our football analogy, we can indeed put our quarterback

out on the field all alone to test his skills -- but this time armed

with an AK-47 assault rifle. Of course, as soon as the ball is hiked,

he shoots the entire defensive team and walks across the goal line. He

wins! Unfortunately, although he scores, there are side effects. The

other team is dead, and the game is over -- but he did score.

Look, just like football is a team game (with the team only as strong

as its weakest link) so too is alternative therapy when it comes to

treating cancer. On occasion, you may get good results using just one

component or another, but overall you will get the best results when

you run the program as a whole. To isolate components of a program from

the whole is to treat them as drugs. That's not what they are, and they

will fail that test by definition.

Another point to keep

in mind is that alternative therapies are not subtractive. They are

"additive." An alternative treatment that would be dismissed as

ineffective because testing showed it to be only 10% effective in

isolation might nevertheless be an invaluable part of a comprehensive

program that contained seven 10% components -- giving you a 70% chance

of overcoming your cancer. But the medical establishment deliberately

chooses not to test alternative therapies in this way -- thus

condemning all seven components with the "quackery" label. So the only

way you hear about effective alternatives is by word of mouth or

anecdotal evidence. Clinical studies are almost designed to fail

alternative therapies by definition.

And that's why the

requirement that physician's in PHS-II who were using any supplements

(such as any multivitamins they were taking) beyond RDA levels had to

forego those supplements for the course of the trial was a deal killer

even before the study started.

So how do you test

alternative protocols? You test the entire protocol as it is being used

in the alternative health community to see if you get the same results.

Then, if you do, you can start pulling out pieces of the protocol one

at a time to see if anything changes. If you pull a piece and nothing

changes, you can conclude that particular piece was not important. But

you start with the complete protocol to see if you can match the

claimed result and set a benchmark. You don't arbitrarily strip the

program down according to your best guess and then trash the entire

protocol because your limited version didn't work.

But it gets even worse!

Scientists chose to test the wrong supplements

As

was done in PHS-I, the physicians were sent calendar packs containing

either placebos or 16 possible combinations of the four supplements.

Each participant was assigned one of those combinations of vitamin E

(400 IU of synthetic alpha-tocopherol), beta-carotene (50 mg Lurotin), vitamin C (500 mg synthetic ascorbic acid), a multivitamin (Centrum Silver),

or their placebos. (Not to be too sarcastic, but when you look at the

actual supplements participants received as indicated by the bold type

above, I'm not sure what the difference was between the supplements and

the placebos.) It should be noted that an additional part of the

protocol was that the Vitamin C and the multivitamin (and their

placebos) were taken daily, whereas the vitamin E and beta-carotene

(and their placebos) were taken every other day. Excuse me, but who

takes their vitamin E or beta carotene supplements every other

day? That would be like having surgery to remove a tumor and having the

doctor decide to only remove half the tumor. Do we actually have to do

a study to figure out how effective that would be? But I digress. The

key point here is that the researchers' selection of supplements was

fundamentally flawed and guaranteed to fail from the outset.

Specifically:

400 IU of synthetic alpha-tocopherols

Synthetic vitamins can be derived from either natural or chemical sources. What

makes them synthetic is that they undergo a process of "conversion,"

either as a result of the extraction process or as the result of pure

chemical buildup. Synthetics are at best about 50% as

effective as natural vitamins and, in many cases, actually suppress the

body's ability to absorb the natural portion of the vitamin. Note:

light passing through a natural vitamin always bends to the right due

to its molecular rotation. Synthetic vitamins behave differently. That

same ray of light splits into two parts when passing through a

synthetic -- one part bending to the right (d for dexorotary), the

other to the left (l for levorotary). A natural vitamin E fraction, for

example, is easily identified then by the "d" in "d-alpha-tocopherol."

the synthetic by the "dl" in "dl-alpha-tocopherol." But does this

matter in terms of efficacy?

Most definitely! Synthetic alpha tocopherol, as I mentioned above, is already proven to be at best, only 50% as effective as the natural form

-- and in some studies actually harmful, this is not an unimportant

distinction. For more on the differences between natural and synthetic

vitamin E, check out:

http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/ss01/attp.htmlhttp://www.jonbarron.org/baseline-health-program/11-08-2004.phphttp://www.jonbarron.org/baseline-health-program/03-14-2005.phphttp://www.jonbarron.org/blog_published/2007/03/vitamin_e.html

But there's more!

You see, neither synthetic dl-alpha tocopherol nor its "natural" form,

d-alpha tocopherol are actually vitamin E. Vitamin E, as are most

vitamins, is a naturally occurring "complex" that never exists in

isolation in nature. (Why is this concept so difficult for medical

researchers to understand?) Vitamin E consists of at least 4

tocopherols (alpha, beta, gamma, and delta) and 4 tocotrienols (alpha,

beta, gamma, and delta).

So how did vitamin E come to be

defined as just one of its eight components? Quite simply, a number of

years ago, researchers looking at the E complex saw that alpha

tocopherol was the predominant component of the complex so they

decided, "It must be the most important. So we'll call that one piece

Vitamin E and ignore the other components." (A fascinating bit of logic

when you think about it.)

Well, over the last few years, researchers have come to understand that alpha tocopherol is not only not

the most important component, it is, at best, number five in the

pecking order-- trailing all of the tocotrienols and gamma tocopherol

in importance.

So the question of the day is, "If

researchers actually know that vitamin E consists of a minimum of eight

components, with alpha tocopherol not even cracking the top half in

importance, why are all these current studies basing their conclusions

on supplementation with this marginally beneficial isolated component

-- and a synthetic version at that?" And the problem is that no matter

what answer you come up with (ignorance, stubbornness, or malice), it's

not good.

50 mg Lurotin

What

the heck is Lurotin? It is a synthetic form of beta carotene made by

extracting benzene rings from acetylene gas, and then attaching the

benzene rings together to form 100% all-trans-beta-carotene. There is

no natural food source in the world that contains 100%

all-trans-beta-carotene. As it turns out, natural beta-carotene is made

of two molecules -- all trans beta carotene and 9-cis beta carotene. In

sources such as Dunaliella salina, the trans and cis forms of beta

carotene are split approximately 50/50.

At one time, studies suggested that synthetic beta carotene actually was absorbed better and worked better than natural forms of beta carotene. But other studies in both animals and humans

have demonstrated far more conclusively that natural beta carotene

provides benefits that that the synthetic form cannot match. And more

to the point, studies have shown that pre-cancerous changes in people

reverted to normal tissue with natural beta-carotene supplements, but

not with synthetic supplements. Incidentally, Lurotin is the same

synthetic form of beta carotene that was used several years ago in a

test of smokers that "proved" that "beta carotene" increases your risk of lung cancer.

I'm sorry, synthesized acetylene gas is not beta carotene, and it

certainly isn't a complete beta-carotene containing both the trans and

cis forms. But beyond that, it is not a complete carotenoid complex.

Like vitamin E, beta carotene does not exist in nature as an isolate.

In nature, beta carotene always comes as part of a carotenoid complex,

not in isolation. There are more than 400 carotenoids in a single

carrot, for example.

For more on beta carotene, check out http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FDN/is_6_5/ai_68727251 .

And as a side note, Lurotin is manufactured by BASF, the massive German

chemical company. Is this a problem? Only if you consider the fact

that BASF is one of the primary sponsors of Codex Alimentarius ,

a set of international trade laws designed to take away your right to

purchase the herbs and supplements of your choice -- no matter what

country you live in.

500 mg synthetic ascorbic acid

The question of synthetic VS natural ascorbic acid

aside, the key issue here is dosage at 500 mg. The problem is that all

significant studies on vitamin C -- particularly those done by Linus

ing -- were done at 4,000 mg a day administered intravenously.

Let me make this brain-dead simple. If you're trying to evaluate a

health protocol, you actually have to use the protocol in question if

you wish to assess it. You can't arbitrarily cut doses by 87% and

conclude the protocol doesn't work.

This study is akin to

trying to determine whether you can lose weight on a low calorie diet

of 1,000 calories a day by feeding people 8,000 calories a day! That's

just plain stupid!

And ing studies are hardly isolated. The results have been duplicated in other models, both animal and human.

Centrum Silver

Not to pick on Centrum Silver, but let's be honest here -- Centrum

Silver is the quintessential low-end, grocery-store multi-vitamin in

the world. It never met a synthetic vitamin isolate it didn't like and has incorporated them wherever possible in its formula

-- as in synthetic E, synthetic beta carotene, polysorbate 80, FD & C

Blue 2 Aluminum Lake, FD & C Red 40 Aluminum Lake, FD & C Yellow 6

Aluminum Lake, and synthetic sodium selenate. With all the vitamin

supplements in the world to choose from in testing efficacy for

preventing cancer, why in the world would you choose Centrum Silver

unless you were looking to guarantee that your test would fail from the

outset? For more on multivitamin supplements, check out my newsletter on multivitamin/mineral formulas .Do vitamin E and beta carotene protect against cancer, or not?

So

now we know all the reasons that we can throw out the recent negative

study results on vitamin E, C, and beta carotene. But that still leaves

the key question unanswered: do these supplemental vitamins protect

against cancer, or not? And the answer?

Who knows? But the

PHS-II study does not come close to answering the question. As we have

seen, both the protocols and implementation of the study were flawed

from the get-go, with the negative results guaranteed even before the

study began.

Interestingly enough, previous research has

shown that people who eat diets rich in vitamins E and C have a lower

risk of cancer. For example:

Dietary vitamin E and prostate cancerDietary vitamins C and E and oral cancerDietary vitamins C and E and bladder cancerDietary beta carotene and prostate cancerDietary beta carotene, vitamin C, and risk of prostate

cancerDietary beta carotene and lung cancer

The

bottom line is that cumulative evidence for the value of dietary

vitamins in preventing cancer is overwhelming. And yet the recent

PHS-II study categorically says these vitamins have no benefit, and the

press ran with that story. But, as we've seen, the quickest of cursory

scans of the study reveals two major disconnects. The study used

synthetic forms of the vitamins -- forms known to be

counter-productive. And the study used dosages below the norm. The

negative results of the study could easily have been predicted by

anyone who had the barest understanding of health and nutrition.

Would the results have been different using naturally sourced full

complex supplements? Who knows? The researchers deliberately chose not

to test them. But my guess based on the reading of informal studies

over the years and the dietary studies cited above is "yes."

The only question unanswered, then, is why the researchers deliberately chose to set up the study in a way guaranteed to fail?