The big meta-study that put vitamin E into Big Pharma's crosshairs.
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By now, you've probably heard about the big meta-study that
put vitamin E into Big Pharma's crosshairs. Headlines have
been emblazoned with warnings that supplementing with
vitamin E could kill you. Granted, it's selling a lot of
newspapers. But here at Nutrition & Healing, we're not
concerned. Nor is Dr. Wright changing any of his
recommendations involving vitamin E. Here's why�
First, a "meta-study" sounds impressive -- they estimated that
it included over 135,000 participants. That makes it sound
like any conclusions that come from such a big sample are
carved in stone. Here's the problem: A meta-study compiles
data from other studies and tries to make conclusions and
spot patterns. In this case, I believe they have failed
miserably.
The data comes from combining a total of 19 studies, and
here are just a few of the flaws they contain that cast serious
doubt about the conclusion:
All of the studies included patients who already had one or
more chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes,
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or kidney failure. All of these
subjects were already at risk for early morbidity. Yet the
study's conclusion extrapolates this data to all healthy
individuals without taking any of the many complicated
factors into account.
Out of the 19 studies examined, only one of them showed
data that was statistically significant for "high" doses of
vitamin E as a possible cause. But half the people in that
study were taking other vitamins and minerals in addition to
vitamin E, so the conclusion that E was the culprit can't be
proven. Also, they examined "all-cause" death, which means
that the participants, who were already at high-risk for
morbidity, could have died from any of a number of causes.
No real link to vitamin E can be even remotely proven with
so many other competing factors.
Oh, and how could I forget? The icing on the cake is that the
meta-study was partially funded by the pharmaceutical
industry, which, as you know, doesn't make any profits when
people take un-patentable supplements such as vitamin E, but
stands to gain a great deal if they can convince people to take
pharmaceuticals instead.
Taking all of these factors into account, this one report
doesn't even come close to outweighing the thousands of
previous studies that have shown vitamin E to be a highly
beneficial tool for disease prevention and overall health
maintenance.
I hope this little dose of reality puts you at ease. It's like our
mothers always tried to tell us: You can't believe everything
you read
From Dr. Jonathan Wright, MD "Nutrition & Healing"
