Vitamins Are Bad for You ... Maybe Kill You?

When I was in high school -- or maybe it was college -- I remember Linus Pauling making news on several fronts.  He had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and he was a political activist.  But then he was saying that he'd taken supplements with a high vitamin C concentration for an extended period of time and it had kept him from getting a cold.

It was kind of big in the news, and a lot of people started taking vitamin C supplements to keep from getting sick.  But my skepticism antenna went up right away.  As near as I could tell, he was committed to a scientific conclusion based only on his own anecdotal evidence.  As it turns out, the idea that Vitamin C prevents or cures sickness has been scientifically discredited, but the mythology persists to this day.  This has stained Pauling's legacy as a remarkable scientist.    

In the 1970s, the idea that vitamin E had increased fertility in rats generated a lot of consumption of vitamin E supplements on the belief that it might have aphrodisiac properties.  This ended abruptly when a study claimed to have found that people taking vitamin E were more likely to die younger than those not taking them.

Vitamin B-12 deficiency can lead to dementia, although not Alzheimer's dementia.  With the exception of supplements that can be generated from yeast, we normally acquire it from animal products, so vegans must take extra precautions to ensure they get adequate B-12.

Vitamin C and vitamin E are antioxidants that can fight oxidation damage in the brain, and oxidation is part of the Alzheimer's disease process.  This is why foods with antioxidant properties, like blueberries and strawberries, are included in the MIND diet.  (We wrote about this back in June.)  We anticipate the results of a large study of the MIND diet that may confirm its benefit with respect to Alzheimer's disease.

As we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster, sometimes we extract nutrients and chemical products from beneficial foods and consume them as supplements.  If they benefit our health in the food, then the supplements should convey the same beneficial properties.  But they don't.

The other day, I saw a BBC article about vitamins ("Why Vitamin Pills Don’t Work, and May Be Bad for You") that was saved by Pocket. The article smacked Pauling up side the head and described a lot of research about vitamin supplements.  Several studies suggested premature deaths resulted from consumption of vitamin supplements.  The authors noted that we don't understand all the dynamics of nutrition, and different nutrients and chemicals in the food may act in concert to produce their benefit.  So consuming red wine (moderately) may have a beneficial effect, but consuming the active ingredient (resveratrol) as a supplement does not.

The article was interesting reading, but the bottom line was: skip the supplements and eat your fruits and vegetables.