Vitamins, Waste of Money or Brain Boosting Reality?
Many claim they have their facts right! Let's take a truly educated deep dive.
I was at the dentist’s office yesterday and we started talking about his older patients and their health… or not. This smart periodontist said he has noticed that his older patients that appear most robust and least aggressively aging of all, have a common thread. They report that they take nutritional supplements. Daily.
Supplements get dinged a lot in the media. Especially pharmaceutical-backed media.
Take the recent headline news that was painted all over the airways, TV shows and podcasts. Regarding the wasted money being spent on useless supplements.
What? On June 21-22, 2022, headlines were all over the news claiming that taking vitamins and other supplements is a waste. A total waste of money.
From WebMD: "Vitamins, Supplements a Waste of Money for Most, Task Force Says."
From CNN Health: "Are you wasting your money on supplements? Most likely, experts say."
From New Scientist: "Vitamins and dietary supplements are a waste of money for most people."
From the News Ticker on CBS Boston: "Experts say vitamin supplements are likely a waste of money."
If you ask many doctors whether you should take supplements, a huge consensus of them respond that all you get would be expensive urine. That there’s NO science behind nutrients and disease cure or prevention.
Saying there’s no science, means they don’t know this science.
As humans, we are prone to be “down” on what we are not “up” on.
Dr. Alan R. Gaby spent most of his career gathering peer review scientific research on the use of nutrients in diverse medical conditions. Dr. Gaby published two editions of his amazing, “must buy” book Nutritional Medicine (I don’t get any pay-offs from this recommendation).
Nutritional Medicine is a formidable opus of the science behind the use of nutrients to help heal and prevent disease. It’s 1454 pages. Published by Fritz Perlberg Publishers.
PS - I dated Fritz way back when. Fritz was a healthy, agile-thinking vegetarian athlete. He got one of the really early cyber knife treatments for a small benign brain tumor, and sadly died young from complications of the radiation.
Nutritional Medicine includes all levels of evidence: double-blind trials, uncontrolled trials, observational studies, and case reports. Dr. Gaby makes it clear what level of evidence is behind each bit of information.
There are over 17,000 references. There are references to more than 2,500 double-blind trials. All on the use of nutrients (nutraceuticals) in the clinical practice of medicine.
BTW, Dr. Gaby and I shared a multi-week multi-level detox program, sponsored years ago by Dr. Walter Crinnon at his innovative detox clinic in the state of Washington.
Dr. Crinnon helped make “environmental medicine” what it is today.
Alan and I would sit together in the sauna, sweating like bullets, trying to keep the several feet high of piles of reprints (kid you not) of peer review literature from getting wet or shredding apart. Alan researched like this (as I have also done) for decades.
One of Alan’s life goals was to sleuth and publish the science behind nutrients and medicine together. To emphasize the huge body of peer review studies that support the use of nutraceuticals.
Alas, these criticizing docs or media/journalists writing or speaking harsh headlines or nay saying to their patients, have not read this amazing and “huge” body of peer review literature.
It is quite fascinating that the same above-mentioned “anti-nutraceutical” headlines were nearly identical.
Especially considering that the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPTF) to which the (media reports were referring) did “not” actually state anywhere in its conclusions, that taking supplements is a waste of money.
What the Task Force did state, says Dr. Alan Gaby (who also published some of these comments in the August 2022 Issue of the Townsend Letter and gave me permission to quote him here) - was,
"The USPSTF concludes that the evidence is insufficient to determine the balance of benefits and harms of supplementation with multivitamins for the prevention of cardiovascular disease or cancer. Evidence is lacking and the balance of benefits and harms cannot be determined."[i] [ii]
The Task Force also acknowledged that their report had a number of limitations.