"Antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise. Soaking up those transient bursts of reactive oxygen species keeps them from signaling. Looked at the other way, oxidative stress could be a key to preventing type II diabetes. Glucose uptake and insulin sensitivity aren’t affected by exercise if you’re taking supplementary amounts of vitamins C and E, and this effect is seen all the way down to molecular markers such as the PPAR coactivator proteins PGC1 alpha and beta. . . . I think that there’s enough evidence to go ahead and say it: exercise and antioxidants work against each other. The whole take-antioxidants-for-better-health idea, which has been taking some hits in recent years, has just taken another big one."
"They were some of the most promising medicines of the 1990s -- wonder pills that appeared to fight cancer, heart disease, stroke and other ailments.-- Karen Kaplan, who, after all these years, is delivering findings that no reasonable person needed to wait for, in The Los Angeles Times.Laboratory tests and initial studies in people suggested that lowly vitamins could play a crucial role in preventing some of the most intractable illnesses, especially in an aging population. The National Institutes of Health gave them the same treatment as top-notch pharmaceutical drugs, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in elaborate clinical trials designed to quantify their disease-fighting abilities.
Now the results from those trials are rolling in, and nearly all of them fail to show any benefit from taking vitamin and mineral supplements.
This month, two long-term trials with more than 50,000 participants offered fresh evidence that vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium supplements don't reduce the risk of prostate, colorectal, lung, bladder or pancreatic cancer. Other recent studies have found that over-the-counter vitamins and minerals offer no help in fighting other cancers, stroke or cardiovascular disease.
Research has even suggested that in some circumstances, the supplements can be unsafe.Some physicians now advise their patients not to bother with the pills, and to rely instead on a healthy diet to provide needed vitamins and minerals.
'These things are ineffective, and in high doses they can cause harm,' said Dr. Edgar R. Miller, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. 'People are unhappy with their diets, they're stressed out, and they think it will help. It's just wishful thinking.'
Yet faith in vitamins runs deep. The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group in Washington, estimates that 64% of American adults take vitamin and mineral supplements.
Despite the steady drumbeat of reports questioning their efficacy, sales have risen steadily, from $5 billion in 1995 to $10 billion this year, according to the Nutrition Business Journal.
Scientists remain convinced that vitamins are essential to health. But they have puzzled over how their obvious benefits could be so elusive in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of medical research.
'You really do need vitamin E. You really do need vitamin C. You really do need selenium,' said Jeffrey Blumberg, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Antioxidants Research Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston. 'Without them, you die.'Blumberg and others now believe that a combination of factors -- including the versions of vitamins that were tested and the populations they were tested in -- probably doomed the studies from the start.
'In retrospect, maybe the expectations were a little bit unrealistic,' said Blumberg, whose research has been funded in part by supplement makers."
"Vitamins taken by around a third of the population do not extend life and may even cause premature death, according to a respected group of international scientists.
And, for those of you who choose to ignore what I tell you (because I'm so "mean") the vitamin supplement industry in America is run by Utah's Republican Senator, the very-right-wing, whack-job Mormon, Orrin Hatch, who, I'm sure, is really happy to have received all your hard-earned "liberal" cash for nothing. (LOL)
