Thought you all might find this article interesting.....I've been taking
multi-vitamins since I was a kid (Flinstone's chewables got me hooked)!
Study finds vitamin pills not helpful
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
Article Last Updated: 02/28/2007 12:59:20 AM MST
Adding to a growing scientific consensus, a large Danish study released Tuesday found that vitamin E and other antioxidant supplements provide no
health benefits and may even produce a small increase in the risk of death.
The report in the Journal of the American Medical Association immediately was criticized by vitamin-makers and some researchers, but its findings are similar to other studies suggesting that supplements are not as quick and easy a way to improve
health as their promoters claim.
Supplements "have great biological plausibility, and we all wish that they would work," but they do not, said Dr. Edgar R. Miller of Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the new study.
"We need to concentrate on life style modifications, stop smoking and lose weight, and not be deceived into thinking that taking a supplement will lower the risk of mortality," he said.
Dr. Goran Bjelakovic of Copenhagen University Hospital and his colleagues performed what is known as a meta-analysis, combining the results from 68 previously published clinical trials involving nearly 250,000 patients.
Using all the studies, they concluded that the supplements, which varied in dosages, were not associated with either an increased or decreased risk of mortality. But when they used only the 47 trials that they considered the best conducted, they found a 4 percent increase in risk of death with vitamin E, a 16 percent increase with
vitamin A and a 7 percent increase with beta-carotene.
Vitamin C supplements showed no benefit or risk in either analysis, while
selenium showed a trend toward increased risk, they said. Their study was funded by the authors' institutions.
While the percentages are low, an estimated 25 percent of the U.S. and European population is thought to take one or more of the supplements, placing potentially large numbers of people at risk. The most common objection to the report regarded the authors' selection of what they considered the best- conducted studies.
It was only after they did this, "using their own criteria, that they observed a statistically significant effect on mortality," said Andrew Shao, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association for makers of supplements.
"This meta-analysis appears to be a predetermined conclusion in search of a method to support it," he said.
Miller, however, noted that "there are good clinical trials and bad ones. ... That's a fine way to do it."
Biochemist Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, also argued that all the original studies used the supplements to try to produce an improvement in patients who already had a disease.
"That may work with a drug, but it is never going to work with a dietary supplement," he said. "You can't undo the damage of decades by giving a dietary supplement for a couple of years."
But Miller noted that the results from the Danish study were virtually identical to those from Women's
Health Study, which involved nearly 40,000 healthy women, showing that the supplements don't work even with subjects who do not have a disease.
Do vitamins benefit us?
And, I feel more alert. 
