this was published in today's Times.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article1449813.ece

Not very good news for those of us who take antioxidants every day - as we are advised to with mecury toxicity.
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Nicola

Well that is concerning, but sometimes it is due to the type of vitamin and what form. Vitamin A could be an issue, but if a person takes it in the form of having cod liver oil daily, this is excellent. Along with that, they get the natural vitamin D also (so long as the cod liver oil has not been tampered with/added to and the vitamins are left in natural form). As this is totally natural.

The article you sent also stated selenium was ok and this is another important mineral so often lacking, but how much and what form depends on what a person can tolerate. But this is a recommended one also by many in the health arena.

Another way of getting good things to happen in the body without taking a whole pile of supplements is simply to try and get them in a natural formed supplement. TAking undenatured whey powder raises the very important "glutathione" levels, which is exactly what is needed by the body to detoxify, and this includes mercury.

Helping the gut/liver both with diet,(no sugar etc) healthy fats for healing and the brain, supplements if possible in their natural form, is probably some of the best things a person can do.

I was recommended that the bear essentials for a toxic person can be cod liver oil (mercury free, blue ice is probably one of the best brands), selenium, undenatured whey powder, and vitamin C. That way you are getting A, C, D, selenium and gluthatione is being raised by the whey powder and selenium. Many others things you'll gain if you stick to a good diet. these added nutrients are excellent in support.

But also another idea is to take one of those green powder health drinks a day, which contain so many nutrients naturally, they are like power houses. So consider that. A green drink (like alfalfa/barley/wheat grass etc), cod liver oil, whey powder, etc and you'll find you are picking up many things naturally.

So if there are concerns, you can simply take things in food form in a more concentrated way to ensure you get enough. E.g. to get enough vitamin B complex weekly, you can eat liver 2-3 times a week, or/ and get a nutritional yeast powder (brewer's yeast might nt be wise for candida people, but another nutritional yeast). Vitamin C, can be taken as a powder, but in food you can get it via oranges, kiwi fruit, broccoli etc. Vitamin E can be from raw nuts, sunflower seeds, apples, etc. A and D (cod liver oil), and selenium from brazil nuts, butter, onions, eggs, seafood etc.

And again a good natural green mix powder supplement to cover so many nutrients in one go. Other than that, I'd not bother buying too many synethic vitamins/minerals.

Makes you wonder who was behind that study. I look at it more as a campaign to make vitamins look bad. Wonder why they don't track prescriptions and how much damage they do, or have done, compared to vitamins.

I dont believe those vitamins can make you ill.
Apparently vitamins and supplements will be phased out for over the counter sales, not good!
Pharmacetical companies will get even richer if we get more ill, so it makes sence to them to keep us ill.
I suspect these headlines are all part of it.

Yeah I reckon you guys maybe right. I mean what on earth kind of evidence would they have to say that people live 5% less from taking them???

It would seem to me that our soils/foods are so lacking in what used to be there once upon a time, that we are in actual fact in more danger of not making sure we substitute those deficiencies somehow.

When reading this type of propaganda, it's important to remember that it's the job of the AMA to protect the income of doctors. Because vitamins and natural supplements can actually decrease doctor visits, doctors lose money when people get healthy.

The AMA has no obligation to be moral or honest.

http://herballure.com/mc/codex

YES, Russ that is so true. So sad too. Doctors almost remain deliberately silent on any natural treatment in favor of drugs. They scratch the drug companies back, and they scratch the docs back and on it goes. Then when you get ill from the medication, they give you more medication to help you with the other medication and on it goes, till you end up with far worse problems than you had originally. The vets do this to animals also. Sadly, they can often end up not only doing more harm, but killing people/animals with this.

There are methods out there to help people naturally, diet/supplements etc, yet doctors seem to steer clear of going into that arena, almost terrified they won't get repeat visits!

It is just sickening. What a world.

The Vitamin Scare: American Medical Association Claims Vitamins May Kill You (Opinion)

By Mike Adams of NewsTarget.Com

The latest round in conventional medicine's ongoing attempts to discredit (and ultimately outlaw) nutritional supplements is found in a highly questionable study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which claims that vitamins actually increase the risk of death.

The study claims to have analyzed a collection of previous studies on Vitamin A, beta carotene, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and selenium, concluding that most of the nutrients are actually dangerous to human health. Of course, this is research from conventional medicine – an industry that promotes patented chemicals as perfectly safe, even though FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are killing 100,000 Americans each year. (Imagine the uproar if vitamins killed even a fraction of that number…)

To avoid getting hoodwinked by questionable research on "vitamins," you have to strongly consider the financial interests of the source of this research. JAMA accepts millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies each year, and its pages are absolutely packed with drug ads. The American Medical Association, for its part, has long worked to discredit alternative medicine and has even been found guilty by U.S. federal courts of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic medicine. The AMA, which is largely considered a joke by anyone familiar with natural health, is hardly a credible source for publishing scientific findings on nutrition. To protect the multi-billion dollar drug industry, the AMA would say practically anything, I believe.

How to fake a vitamin study

Faking a vitamin study to show supplements as harmful is extremely easy to pull off, by the way. All you have to do is use synthetic forms of the vitamins and avoid using natural, food-sourced vitamins. These synthetic vitamins – which are really just industrial chemicals – may be called "Vitamin E" or "Vitamin A" or even "Vitamin C" but they have no functional resemblance to the real vitamins that occur in nature. Every single study over the past two decades that has sought to discredit Vitamin E, for example, focused on using synthetic Vitamin E in order to show harm. It is curious that no researcher from the world of conventional medicine will ever test the natural, full-spectrum vitamins, nutrients and phytochemicals that appear in nature. You know why? Because they would discover a universe of natural medicine that makes patented prescription drugs obsolete.

A second way to fake a vitamin meta-data study is to simply cherry-pick the results you want to include in your meta-data analysis. This is a routine trick used by dishonest researchers who have an agenda of discrediting nutritional supplements. To pull this one off, they simply eliminate all previous studies that showed positive results for vitamins, and include only previous studies that showed negative results. Then they run a statistical analysis on all the studies they hand-picked and declare – surprise! – those vitamins are dangerous! Many of the studies on vitamin E, by the way, were conducted on dying heart patients who were only expected to live two weeks, regardless of what they took.

A third way to distort the science is to confuse people with statistical obfuscation. The reporting on this particular study, for example, confuses absolute risk with relative risk. Vitamin A, according to the reports on this study, increased mortality risk by 16 percent. But that is a relative risk number, meaning that if 1 person out of 100 normally died, then 1.16 people out of 100 would die when taking these synthetic Vitamin A supplements. In other words, it might not even be one additional person out of 100, or even out of 1000.

And yet, it is curious that when conventional medical researchers report the results of mortality risks for their prescription drugs, they always use absolute risk. They say things like, "Well, this drug only increased the risk by one percent." But what they are not saying is that it may be a 200% relative increase in mortality risk, depending on the baseline absolute mortality numbers. So if only 0.5 people out of 100 normally died from heart disease during a particular study, but 1.5 people died when taking a drug during that study, the relative risk increase is 200%. But the medical journals and the mainstream media will report is at a "one percent increase."

You see how the game is played? Here's the con:

• All statistics on the dangers of prescription drugs are reported as absolute risk to make the numbers seem smaller (and make drugs seem safe).

• All statistics on the dangers of synthetic vitamins are reported as relative risk to make the numbers seem larger (and vitamins seem dangerous).

And this is how conventional medicine lies with statistics. It's only one of the many tricks used to disinform the American public about the dangers of pharmaceuticals or the benefits of nutrition.

This research published in JAMA does remind us of one important point, however: synthetic chemicals are harmful to human health. If you take cheap "vitamins" made of these synthetic chemicals, you are doing yourself more harm than good. These cheap vitamin manufacturers, by the way, are usually owned by pharmaceutical firms. I would personally never take vitamins purchased at common retailers such as Wal-Mart or Walgreens. I only recommend and consume vitamins from high-end nutritional supplement companies.

Blurring the line to scare consumers

But conventional medicine researchers try to blur the line between "junk vitamins" and "quality vitamins" by classifying all nutritional supplements as "vitamins," regardless of what they're really made from. By discrediting a few synthetic chemicals, they can effectively dissuade the masses from taking ANY vitamins, including the good ones. And that is, of course, their goal: to use FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to scare consumers away from nutritional supplements so that patients will flock to the patented, synthetic chemicals that earn drug companies billions of dollars in profits. Drugs make money for Big Pharma, and vitamins compete with drug sales. Once you understand the economics and the motives of the parties involved here, the junk science con becomes quite obvious: Pushers of pharmaceuticals will always use dirty tricks to discredit nutritional supplements because it is in their financial interests to do so.

My own financial interests, by the way, are squeaky clean. I sell no supplements, I earn no money from supplement companies, and in fact I am not even paid by NewsTarget for my work on these articles. In terms of potential conflicts of interest, I have far more credibility than the AMA, a shady organization that remains mired in blatant conflicts of interest and a frightening agenda of pushing drugs, surgery and radiation onto as many Americans as possible.

Now, here's a common sense way to quickly realize the JAMA research is complete nonsense. Round up 100 people who are taking multiple pharmaceuticals, and compare their health to 100 people who are taking vitamins and nutritional supplements. Guess who's healthier? The supplement crowd will be healthier every time. It's the obvious question: If vitamins are so dangerous, where are all the dead vitamin takers? And if pharmaceuticals are so safe, where are all the super-healthy prescription drug patients? They are nowhere to be found.

The healthiest people, by far, are those who take supplements, who engage in regular exercise, and who avoid taking prescription drugs.

Why conventional medical researchers remain nutritionally illiterate

Western medicine still doesn't "get" nutrition. They think all health effects are achieved by single, isolated chemical constituents. But nutrition doesn't work that way. In nature, for example, Vitamin C is not a single chemical, but rather a symphony of complementary phytonutrients that work in concert. Conventional medical researchers almost never test plant medicine using full-spectrum nutrients. Why? Because they don't understand the concept of nutritional synergy.

The bottom line? Only fools believe research about nutrition that comes from the American Medical Association or its journal. Conventional medical researchers declaring that vitamins are worthless is about as credible as Bush Administration climatologists claiming there's no such thing as global warming.

With the publication of this research, the distortion of health reality is now complete. According to the Americal Medical Association, vitamins will kill you but pharmaceuticals will make you healthy.

Someone help me stop laughing before I blow out a lung and require surgery.

Ok guys. I was hoodwinked by the headlines. Duh....!

Nicola

Mike Adams did fine job (in particular pointing out the meta-studies scam) as far as he went.To see how this "science to order" is produced on industrial scale these days, check a nice online book: "Science Without Sense: The Risky Business of Public Health Research" by Steve Milloy, with chapter 6 on meta-studies The Mixmaster Technique. Another good site taking trouble to debunk junk science scams 'du jour' is "Number Watch".

Unfortunately, Mike Adams didn't address the principal sleight of hand of statistical "junk studies" -- the leap from association to causation. For example if you look a population of "aspirin users" they will have on average more headaches than "aspirin non-users" i.e. technically "aspirin use" is a "risk factor" for headaches. Does that mean "aspirin use" causes headaches? Of course not. The remedy and the cause will statistically associate with diseases. In case of vitamins and natural remedies, that point is even more relevant since those who tend to use remedies of any sort would tend to have more problems, which is why they seek remedies.

[color:"blue"] Use of dietary supplements in Denmark is associated with health and former smoking
Knudsen V.K.*; Rasmussen L.B.; Haraldsdóttir J.; Ovesen L.; Bülow I.; Knudsen N.; Jørgensen T.; Laurberg P.; Perrild H.
Public Health Nutrition, Volume 5, Number 3, June 2002, pp. 463-468(6)

Objectives: To describe the use of dietary supplements in a group of Danish adults and to investigate the differences between users and non-users with respect to age, gender, health and lifestyle factors.

Design: Cross-sectional study in two Danish cities.

Setting: The Danish Investigation on Iodine Intake and Thyroid Diseases, 1997–1998.

Subjects: Participants were 3707 women (selected age groups between 18 and 65 years) and 942 men (60–65 years). Participation rate was 50%. Supplement data were collected in a personal interview. Data on education, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, use of medication and self-perceived health were derived from a self-administered questionnaire. Multiple logistic regression was used for the statistical analysis.

Results: Participants were asked about all kinds of supplements, ranging from products containing vitamins and minerals, to fish oils and products of herbal origin. On average 59% reported use of some kind of dietary supplement. Most common were combined multivitamin/mineral products (48%) followed by single vitamin C products (10%). Twelve per cent used three or more different supplements. Supplement use was strongly associated with age and gender, being highest among elderly women (78%). Ex-smokers were more likely to use supplements than subjects who had never smoked (odds ratio (OR) 1.36, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.09–1.76). Supplement use was more likely among subjects who had many days of illness ([/color][color:"red"]OR=1.37[/color][color:"blue"], 95% CI 1.12–1.66) and among users of medication (OR=1.22, 95% CI 1.04–1.42). Subjects who perceived their health as poor were more likely to use supplements other than just a multivitamin/mineral tablet (OR=2.2, 95% CI 1.31–3.77).

Conclusions: Use of dietary supplements was related to age, gender and smoking, but also to poor self-perceived health status and absence from work. This indicates that a group of people use supplements as a form of self-medication.
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By technically labeling any statistical association association a "risk factor" or just "risk", by the time it gets into mass media, the junk science peddlers dupe most people unfamiliar with their techniques. This particular sleight of hand is covered in the Milloy's book, chapter two, "2-4-6-8 What Can We Associate!".