Why I do not take any supplants at all
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Most Supplements do nothing.: Why I do not... - Cure Parkinson's
Most Supplements do nothing.
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condor39
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The WaPo won't allow that article to be read without a subscription. Do you know another way to post it?
Sorry I do not know how, I will try again. The article expresses well that while 35 Billion dollars are spent on Supplements, there is practically no evidence that any of them work.
I should add, that I know this will have no effect on the use of supplements.
Maybe go directly to Washington Post to get the article directly.
I wonder where you are getting your information? I have read that most Americans are deficient in magnesium and vitamin D. Vitamin D is especially needed in the northern states. There was a study done many years ago, which stated every woman with breast cancer in the study, had inadequate levels of Vitamin D.
In medical school, how many hours did you receive in nutrition? I have heard it's about 1/2 hour.
I can’t recall how many hours, but it was too many, as everything I was taught about nutrition was wrong, and I suspect everything they teach now is wrong too.
From my experience eat a varied dit, and probably some fibre, an d the body will make everything it needs.
I cant read the article either but this is probably based on the assumption that the person taking them is healthy which pwp are not. And bepo is correct, lots of people live in a country where they dont get enough sunlight to get adequate vitamin d and should supplement during the winter months. There was an article on the guardian in the last year describing a similar study. Basic summary was that you basically pee it all out as your body is already got enough.
Everything you learned about nutrition in Medical school was wrong? Unbelievable. That's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
I agree, the best place to get your vitamins is through your diet. I also believe in some supplementation. I was taking 5,000 iu of vitamin D3. daily. My test results suggested I take 1,000 iu of vitamin D3. I live in the north, snow country. During the winter, I take 20,000 iu's and during the summer, I take 10,000. I have a gene whereby I don't absorb vitamin D3 well.
I also have the MTHFR gene so I don't absorb vitamin B12. I have to take a methylated form methyl-B12 and folate. My husband takes HDT,( High Dose Thiamine) for his Parkinson's.
How much thiamine does your husband take?
We have kept his PD at bay before the B1. We originally started with 2 grams, lowering it gradually, and then continued to start with the lowest milligrams, 50 mg. We are now at 200 mg in the am and 150 in the afternoon. We will stay here for a week. The tremor, which is the last to improve, is so easy to see, so we judge the tremor. He's also started talking in his sleep, which I guess is REM disruption. I know we will find the right dose.
I have tremors. What dose to stop the tremors?
Probiotics are also extremely important.
I have the Factor 5- Leiden gene, which thickens my blood. I wasn't aware I had it, and I had a pulmonary embolism. For years since the PE, I have taken nattokinese daily. That thins the blood naturally. When I removed myself from coumadin, the doctor stated, " I don't know of anything besides pharmaceuticals that thin the blood." I believe he also should have said, "If I don't know about it, it doesn't exist." When? When? have pharmaceuticals cured any chronic illness? They maintain, but don't cure. These are chemicals that are foreign to the body.
• in reply tobepo
vitamin D is only one vitamin (of which deficiency is acknowledged) and is not representative of the huge number of supplements taken - often far in excess of possible need or, indeed, when there is no demonstrated deficiency. I remember cinnamon and diabetes but that seems to have quietened down now!!
Secret they'd rather you didn't know: you can get two articles by deleting your washingtonpost cookies on your computer (somewhat difficult on a phone but works fine on a computer). If you know how to delete the cookies, you can do so ad nauseum, but that becomes a Major Payne {as it were), so they allow it and yes they do know about it.
But better yet: you can buy an introductory month one time for $1.00. Unlimited access for that time. I liked it so much I eventually subscribed, also on a promotion, for quite a reasonable rate. They like doing the one month trial because they do get a good proportion continuing to subscribe further, justifying providing for those who elect to cancel. Good marketing that, priming the pump or like a dealer of an addictive substance giving out enough free samples to get you addicted, following the 18th century business model of Jardiene Matheson in using opioids conquering China... which American opiod manufacturers observed in doing the same in 20-21st century. (If the drug cartels only knew that all they need do was purchase shares in those pharmaceuticals, they could have avoided much disorder and violence, but I digress). If you cancel right away, they honor the 30 days and don't bill you further.
WaPo is a good paper, but I subscribe to the New York Times as an act of citizenship.
"The WaPo won't allow that article to be read without a subscription. Do you know another way to post it?" -MBAnderson
Personally, my last sources to trust on anything would be the Washington Post, and the aforementioned New York Times...and especially on natural healing.
Here it is:
"How is it that perfectly respectable public-health initiatives, such as vaccines and water fluoridation, give rise to suspicion and conspiracy theories, while an entire industry that’s telling us out-and-out falsehoods in order to take our money gets a free pass?
Dietary supplements, people! Where is the outrage?
Every year, Americans spend something like $35 billion on vitamins, minerals, botanicals and various other substances that are touted as health-giving but mostly do nothing at all. Nothing at all!
Could the entire category really just be a rip-off? I turned to the National Institutes of Health. I spoke with Carol Haggans, a scientific and health communications consultant with the Office of Dietary Supplements, about vitamins and minerals, and to Craig Hopp, deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, about botanical and other kinds of supplements.
My question was the same: Which dietary supplements actually have well-established benefits?
Here’s what the government’s dietary guidelines should really say
“It’s a short list,” Hopp told me. “Ginger for nausea, peppermint for upset stomach, melatonin for sleep disruption. And fish oil does seem to show some promise for cardiovascular disease, although some of the data is conflicting.” He went on to list some of the supplements that haven’t shown benefits in trials: turmeric, St. John’s wort, ginkgo, echinacea.
On the vitamin and mineral side, Haggans pointed out a couple of wins. Folic acid reduces risk for fetal neural tube defects, and it is widely recommended for women who may become pregnant. Vitamin B12 in food is sometimes poorly absorbed, she told me, and supplements can help in people over 50 (and vegans, because B12 comes from animal products). Then there’s a combination supplement that may slow the progression of macular degeneration. It’s also possible a daily multivitamin may decrease some disease risk.
Beyond that, supplements can help fill in a nutrient gap if you don’t get enough, say, magnesium in your diet, but we don’t have a lot of compelling evidence that using supplements to do that improves health outcomes. (I’m talking about the United States here; in the developing world, where deficiencies are common, supplements play a different role.)
I also checked in with Andrea Wong, senior vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry group. She mentioned some of the same benefits and added that the Food and Drug Administration allows a health claim on calcium, or a combination of calcium and vitamin D, for reducing risk of osteoporosis.
All processed food isn’t bad. We took a nutritionist shopping to find reasonable options.
That covers the noncontroversial territory, where both industry and independent scientists agree that there’s at least some evidence of benefits. If you’ve got a favorite — niacin? garlic? — you could try to make the case. (If you want to investigate your supplement of choice, a good place to start is with NIH fact sheets.) This column is obviously too short to adjudicate every single one, but Hopp’s assessment stands: It’s a short list.
But how about the vast expanse of shelves of dietary supplements that aren’t among those listed? The ones that purport to give you energy, support your immune system, stimulate hair growth or enlarge your penis? Wong points out that the FDA does regulate those claims; the agency requires that they have substantiation and be truthful.
You can hop on over to the FDA’s website and read about what exactly constitutes “substantiation,” and you’ll find it’s a low bar. I have yet to talk to a scientist who takes dietary supplement claims seriously, so I asked Wong to refer me to one — somebody with no ties to industry who believed the health claims made on dietary supplements were meaningful.
Readers, she couldn’t.
Think about that for a second. The dietary supplements industry group couldn’t point me to a single independent scientist who comes down on their side of this. Wong made the case that I shouldn’t dismiss research out of hand just because it’s done by industry. And I agree, although I always take the funding source into consideration. But if the body of evidence were compelling, at least some independent scientists would be persuaded. They’re not. They’re just not.
On top of that, some dietary supplements can be downright harmful. There’s no requirement that supplement companies establish safety before they market their products, but they are required to report serious adverse events, and the FDA monitors those. If things get bad, they step in.
Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, points to ephedra as the poster supplement for the harm the category can do. It’s a substance that occurs naturally in some plants, and it was marketed as an appetite suppressant and energy booster. But then 155 people died, and the FDA took it off the market in 2003. But it’s the only dietary supplement that has been banned in the history of dietary supplements.
How processed food makes us fat
Lurie points out that even vitamins, which we think of as, at worst, benign, can increase disease risk: In trials, beta-carotene increased risk of lung cancer in smokers, and vitamin E increased risk of prostate cancer. According to Haggans, high doses of vitamin A can cause birth defects, and too much iron can even be fatal. “With vitamins and minerals,” she says, “the main risk is getting too much.”
Lurie is also concerned that we don’t have a good way of knowing what damage supplements do. We have little safety information on the active ingredients, adulteration and contamination are real problems, and only serious adverse events are required to be reported to the FDA. It’s more than reasonable to believe there may be dangerous products on the market; we just don’t know what they are.
But take heart! “The reassurance, such as it is, comes from the fact that the products are mostly ineffective,” Lurie told me.
And that’s the dietary supplement conundrum. Most of them do nothing, so you shouldn’t take those. But the ones that actually do something are the ones that pose danger, so you shouldn’t take those either. If something really can enlarge your penis, imagine the havoc it can wreak in your liver.
(iStock)
That’s the lay of the land. Supplements have very few benefits and some serious risks. So why do some three-quarters of Americans spend $35 billion on them every year?
I asked Alan Levinovitz, professor of religion at James Madison University and author of “Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science” (available in April). The first thing he pointed to was the pictures of fruits and leaves on the bottle, the emphasis on plant-based ingredients and the focus on naturalness. “Think about the names medicines have,” he said. Atorvastatin! Tramadol! “They sound like alien space lords. Then look at supplements with names like Nature’s Way.”
People feel comfortable with herbs and other botanicals, and they feel empowered by the idea that they make these choices for themselves. “You’re like a sorcerer,” said Levinovitz. “Do I want to supercharge my brain or refresh my vitality? There couldn’t be a more empowering place than the supplement aisle.” The only problem, of course, is that “none of it’s true.”
Levinovitz sees ritual in supplement-taking; it’s a way to counterbalance the disempowerment of modern medicine. “It’s an unmet need,” he told me, and he sees a parallel to prayer. How can we measure the value of those things? It makes no scientific sense, but what do we do about things that make no scientific sense but still matter to people?
Since people like supplements, and often think they do better with them than without them, I’d be reluctant to issue an across-the-board no-supplements diktat even if I could. But I can’t stop thinking about what people could do with that $35 billion. For starters, you could buy every man, woman and child a hefty (½ cup, dry) serving of lentils every single day. Not only would that be 24 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber, it would be a whole day’s folate and hefty doses of thiamin, iron, phosphorous and zinc. Also soup. Take that, vitamin pill.
Alas, I don’t think I can talk people into lentils any more than I can talk them out of dietary supplements. But maybe if someone could find a way to put them in a pill . . ."
Thank you, thank you.
You're welcome. I don't happen to agree with the article. I take supplements but before I do, I read as much as I can to educate myself. I know for a fact supplements I've used in the past have helped me. It's trial and error, just like medicine.
Everyone is different. I have outlined above how my nutritional needs differ from others. Look at Life Extension studies. None of them are double blind. Those are too expensive. They are anecdotal. My husband takes L-tyrosine and 5-htp along with mucuna, which has kept his PD under control. Nothing foreign to the body. No side effects.
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washingtonpost.com/lifestyl...
This link did not work either, but that's fine with me, I don't have time to waste on such blather. Just because it's a newspaper article hardly makes it science.
I've probably read 100 studies that provide hard, incontrovertible, scientific data that some supplements provide some benefit to some people. The evidence/data is overwhelming.
By efficacy rates, supplements are a far bigger scam than Big Pharma has ever been able to pull.
pvw2• in reply to
But, the article is grouping things like racial profiling. Kind of like saying Americans eat a lot of food that is bad for them, so why do they spend money on food? The article admits some supplements are good, but doesn't attempt to separate out the money spent on bad supplements because there is no agreement even among doctors. In some ways the article is more theoretical that fact. But, similarly many people put fertilizer on their lawn without testing the soil because it's cheaper than testing.
bepo• in reply to
Hardly! Big Pharma makes their own supplements.
I get so tired of people buying rediculous references like WaPo and Time magazine. Seriously? You have to come up with better than that. Isn't mucuna considered a supplement? Yet my body is a day and night difference since starting it. I had parethesias do bad I couldn't sleep for a week, took B12 and in a few days I was normal again. If I don't take magnesium and B12 I have restless leg do bad I can't sleep. A double dose of Vit C knocks out a cold. You can't pay me take drugs or listen to erroneous sources paving the way for taking these wonderful nutrients away from me. I could go like with my chromium picolinate and it alone managed my blood sugar.
Well, what a cheek! So little research into supplements and they can make these statements. As my husband’s neurologist says “you can’t patent a vitamin, so not much research, try it”.
Condor:
#1 The Washington Post or any other newspaper does not provide a legitimate citation to prove or disprove a point.
#2 PD as well as all the major neurodegenerative conditions we deal with today are extremely resistant to any treatment...... drug, surgery, supplements, meditation, exercise, etc. or whatever you want to chose because these conditions exist from a complex web of factors probably existing over years in most cases. They are progressive for a reason regardless of the modality.
#3 From a research point of view with various types of cancer wasting, you could search Pub Med or similar data bases and find multiple supplements that effectively reduce its impact. So, supplements in specific cases and conditions have a place. They are not miracles, but neither are they are not useless.
Sharon
Check his profile. Not that I agree with him on this point, but he's a pretty impressive individual.
Seven months ago, condor39 posted under the heading ‘Supplements Useless’.
I guess he is bored and wants to stir the pot again...ho hum.
Condor39,
You've led a very interesting life. I'm jealous of your flying and sailing adventures.
I would agree that too many people put too much faith in supplements, but to say there is no data, is just simply not true.
This point has been made, but consider it from this angle; add up the total amount of money spent on the worst food from McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and the several dozen other fast/junk food chains and we see that there are hundreds of millions of meals consumed which are virtually worthless and many of them do more harm than good. Every one of those meals displaces nutrition and most of them were consumed by poor people.
All of those people would be healthier if they took a high quality multiple vitamin.
Consider the health profile of the population as a whole, i.e., some say 50% of the population is either diabetic or prediabetic, etc.
Also, consider the amount of chronic disease in this country that could be avoided by healthy lifestyle and one can only conclude that this food supply chain mostly does not deliver minimum nutrition.
Lastly, health benefits from the placebo effect are, nonetheless, health benefits.
Curcumin;
I post this link ONLY to illustrate the volume of data, i.e., the number of studies for this one supplement. Taken together, they constitute evidence.
MOST SUPPLEMENTS DO NOT WORK?
I waited until everyone had a chance to respond, and I expected the reactions, which I can group as follows:
1.The ones who admitted they had not read the article, but felt free to respond.
2.The ones who did not notice the word “MOST” supplements, and gave stories of a supplement which they said worked for them.
3.Several writers took umbrage at being referred to a “Newspaper” article. In particular Sharon was insulted by this. I suggest that she should take more heed to the content, rather than where it is printed. But if it helps, there was a similar article in the New England Journal of Medicine about two years ago, which also drew some angry comments from people who do not wish to read opposing views.
4.On the shoot the messenger field, I do enjoy a good insult. “has lost all credibility” and “smug arrogance of the originator “. Come on, guys, I just referred you to a newspaper article. If you do not agree, write your own article on “Most Supplements do work” . I will read it, however non-sensical.
Finally, my views on the subject are those of the great majority of physicians
Do most media outlets, including the Washington Post receive money from the Pharmaceuticals? How could CBS or NBC report on anything but the pharmaceuticals? Does the Michael J.Fox Foundation receive money from the pharmaceuticals?
5. Those completely disinterested in this type post that ignore you (which is your concern) and for this reason you do not see them, but there are many and many.
P.S. These things you've written before, it would be better for all of us if you just renew a little bit.
Condor 39,
You've made good points.
I posted a comment before I read the article and I posted a couple after reading the article.
The written word is often interpreted more harshly than it is intended. I think this is an important discussion.
Defending the article by saying it said only that "most" supplements do nothing is to hang your defense on a technicality, i.e., the word "most," because taken on the whole, a legitimate interpretation and the thrust of the article is that 'supplements have no value.' There may be several thousand different supplements and I might well agree that most of them have so little value as to be not worth the price.
So let's reframe the discussion to what matters to PWP and let's not judge the entire universe of supplements, but instead let's judge the supplements that are discussed on this forum. So the only question that matters is; is there science behind the supplements discussed on this forum?
More to the point, a lot of us don't feel like waiting for FDA approval if that's what you use as the definition of evidence. Were trying to forestall the tipping point and we have to make decisions based on what's available to us now.
Defending your position by saying most doctors agree is exactly like saying people who have had absolutely no education, training, or experience in a particular field, don't know anything about it. I see a neurologist at the Minneapolis VA and I find him extremely knowledgeable and believe he is excellent, but I don't ask him and I could care less what he thinks of the supplements I take.
Thank you for being so gracious with those who disagree with you.
Marc
Dr. Condor:
1) You might bring yourself up to date on the credibility of the NEJM (let alone the WaPo as a source of valid information). The NEJM sold its soul for many dollars awhile back so using an article in it as a benchmark for your thesis to support the lame WaPo article is somewhat questionable. I would point you to Dr. Dalrymple's book.
Turning a critical eye on a journal often decried by the supplement industry as a soapbox for the pharmaceutical industry, Theodore Dalrymple read the New England Journal of Medicine for a year. The retired doctor delves into his criticisms in a new book, "False Positives: A Year of Error, Omission and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine." Pretty damning condemnation of the editors.
2) The use of the phrase "most do nothing" is fuzzy-wuzzy in the extreme. What do you mean by "most"? For most people most of the time? Some people most of the time?
Just one example. You could easily say mannitol (popular on this forum) does nothing most of the time because you have very little chemistry background as a typical physician, but if you were conversant with the chemistry of PD, the Osmotic blood-brain barrier disruption (BBBD) uses mannitol to open the blood vessels around the brain and allow larger molecule substances to be carried directly to the brain where otherwise they would not be able to do so. It is also, very importantly, a a-synuclien aggregation inhibitor. Critical usefulness for PD patients. Not a cure, but extremely useful.
3) As to what "works" and what doesn't, it all depends on the denotation of the word "work" and the context. If we are singularly focusing on PD, then nothing works as a cure because any physician or researcher who deals with PD patients or conducts CTs on a regular basis knows the disease is almost always progressive regardless of the treatment modality. It doesn't matter what is prescribed or suggested or approved, so your basic thesis is flawed to say the least unless you state: "most everything doesn't work most of the time for most PD patients".
Sharon
Well put.
Thanks!
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