LOS ANGELES – If you’re taking a multivitamin to live longer, a brand new study from researchers on the National Cancer Institute may make you modify your mind.
After analyzing health and nutrition data from nearly 400,000 Americans, researchers found that folks who took multivitamin supplements had a small but significantly higher risk of premature death than individuals who didn’t take the supplements.
The Resultsreported Wednesday within the journal JAMA Network Open, could appear confusing. Americans are usually not known Eating as balanced a weight loss plan as possible and taking a pill to compensate for our dietary deficiencies is commonly touted as a smart safeguard.
Furthermore, vitamins are vital. It is apparent that the more you eat, the higher.
But as with so many things that affect our health, the science shouldn’t be so clear.
It was not until 2022 that the experts for the US Preventive Services Task Force carried out a radical review the medical literature on the potential of multivitamins to forestall heart problems and cancer. They concluded that insufficient reliable evidence to make a advice in a single direction or the opposite.
Two things make it difficult to evaluate the advantages of multivitamins.
On the one hand, there’s the “healthy user effect.” This describes the proven fact that individuals who take multivitamins are likely to do many helpful things, including eating vegatables and fruits, exercising usually, and avoiding smoking. When assessing the connection between multivitamin use and longevity, these habits might make the pills or liquids seem more helpful than they really are.
On the opposite hand, there’s the “sick user effect.” People diagnosed with a chronic illness often respond by adding a multivitamin to their day by day intake. In real-world studies, this results in the supplements being related to poorer health and making them seem less helpful than they really are.
To fill the gaps in previous research, a team led by epidemiologist Erika Loftfield collected data from three large studies that followed participants for many years – the National Institutes of Health-AARP Nutrition and Health Study; The Screening study for prostate, lung, colon and ovarian cancer (PLCO) and that Agricultural health study. All individuals who had a chronic disease at enrollment within the study were excluded from the team's evaluation.
A complete of 390,124 people within the three studies reported details about their multivitamin use, and half of them were no less than 61½ years old once they began statement. By the tip of the study period — December 2019 or December 2020, depending on which cohort they belonged to — 164,762 of them had died, including about 50,000 deaths from cancer and 35,000 deaths from heart disease.
There were some notable differences between those that took multivitamins and those that didn’t. For example, 49% of people that took a day by day multivitamin were women, in comparison with 39% of those that never took one. In addition, 42% of people that took a day by day multivitamin had attended college, in comparison with 38% of those that had not.
The health habits of vitamin users and non-users also differed. People who took day by day multivitamin supplements smoked less, exercised more, had higher weight loss plan quality scores and lower body mass index, and took individual vitamin and mineral supplements more often.
After accounting for these and other differences, the researchers found that folks who avoided multivitamins altogether had the bottom risk of death throughout the first 12 years of their follow-up. Compared with those that took multivitamins day by day, the death rate was 4% higher and those that took them less often had a 9% higher death rate.
Younger vitamin users had the very best risk. Among those that participated in certainly one of the studies before their fifty fifth birthday, the death rate was 15 percent higher amongst those that took the supplements day by day than amongst those that didn’t take them in any respect.
Loftfield and her team also compared the chance of death over the subsequent 15 years. Over this longer period, there have been no statistically significant differences between the three groups.
This will not be excellent news for the about 1 in 3 Americans who take a multivitamin complement no less than once a month – despite the proven fact that researchers say for years that vitamin preparations don’t live as much as their status as health-promoting dietary supplements.
“Multivitamin supplements promise too much and deliver too little,” said Dr. Neal D. BarnardPresident of the Medical Committee for Responsible Medicine“They have undeservedly earned the reputation of being an essential part of a healthy lifestyle.”
Barnard and two of his colleagues from the PCRM explained the way it got here about in a comment which accompanies the studies.
Multivitamins separated from food became a industrial product within the Nineteen Forties, and Americans today give 8 billion dollars per 12 months to the additions.
In some cases, vitamin pills could be helpful, wrote Barnard and his colleagues. People with age-related macular degeneration May slow the progression of the disease by taking a cocktail of beta-carotene, zinc and vitamins C and E. The intake of multivitamins by older adults has been linked with higher memory and cognitive function. And individuals who bariatric surgery It is advisable that you simply take multivitamin supplements to compensate for the proven fact that your body isn’t any longer capable of absorb as many nutrients from food.
But these advantages are usually not enough to forestall death. In fact, taking the pills can backfire.
Multivitamins contain calcium And zinc may affect the body's ability to soak up antibiotics. Multivitamins containing vitamin K may reduce the blood-thinning effect of Warfarina drug that hundreds of thousands of Americans take to forestall dangerous blood clots. The iron in multivitamins may cause Hemochromatosiswhich puts patients in danger for heart problems, liver failure, and Alzheimer's, amongst other diseases.
“The whole thing has a pretty big disadvantage,” said Barnardwho can be an associate professor on the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Science. “They are not just benign.”
If you wish vitamins to assist you to, typically it's a lot better to get them directly from food, says Loftfield. Barnard agrees.
“Taking a vitamin completely out of context and increasing the dosage to a formula that nature has never really seen is not necessarily a good idea,” he said. “Mortality is reduced by dietary habits, not pills.”
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