Word: vitamin
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Brody's warning comes in the midst of a vitamin boom. As her article noted, Americans have more than doubled their spending on vitamins and minerals in the past six years, from $3 billion in 1990 to $6.5 billion in 1996. They have also ratcheted up the dosages they take, gulping down supplements at 10, 50, even 100 times the daily recommended levels. One-A-Day and other multivitamin products were originally designed to prevent such centuries-old nutritional deficiencies as scurvy and beriberi. But now the same micronutrients are being taken in megadoses--in effect, as drugs--to prevent...
...Brody rain on this pill-popping parade? "My major hope was to awaken the public to the fact that vitamins and other supplements are not always innocent," she says. "I'm often asked by people, 'Should I take this vitamin?' 'Am I taking enough of that?' Even 'Can I take vitamins instead of antibiotics...
What bothers Brody is that there is precious little scientific evidence to support the more ambitious claims being made for vitamins, and what evidence there is is often far from definitive. The quantity of vitamins that an adult or a child should consume depends on many factors, including age, sex and health condition. Making matters more complicated, nutrients tend to interact with one another. For example, vitamin C is supposed to act as an antioxidant, preventing damage to the cells. But that same vitamin, in the presence of iron, can act as a pro-oxidant, causing, rather than preventing, cellular...
...supplement has been more battered by conflicting reports than beta-carotene, a vitamin found in fruits, carrots, spinach and other dark green leafy vegetables. Studies in the 1980s showed that people who consume a lot of beta-carotene-rich foods have a marked decrease in their risk of cancer. Those studies set off a beta-carotene craze and created a huge market for beta-carotene supplements. It wasn't until the late 1980s that researchers from Finland and the U.S. decided to test the proposition that beta-carotene in pill form could protect smokers from cancer. The results were...
Even Brody takes 400 units of vitamin E and 200 mg of C every day, however, just to be safe. She's not saying that supplements are bad, or that there's any danger in giving kids their Flintstone vitamins. Her concern is that too many people are taking huge doses without much evidence that they will do any good and without considering the harm they might cause. "If you have reason to believe that you are shortchanged on a single nutrient, you have to know what the risks are," she says. "That may require a consultation with a professional...