Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Should You Be Popping Vitamins?


Ok, let's be honest now, how many of you are regularly popping vitamin pills? You may not need to judging from the results from a very large study to find if there is any associations between multivitamin use and risk of cancer, heart disease and mortality (death rates) in post menopausal women.

The study followed more than 160,000 women in their 50's for 8 years. Detailed data were studied on multivitamin use at baseline and certain follow up times. What the researchers found was that there were little or no differences on the risk of common cancers and heart diseases whether you took multivitamins or not. There were also no differences in death rates between those who took vitamins and those who didn't.

The conclusion from the researchers was to get your nutrients from real food as they are better than dietary supplements. I'll second that, coz' real food tastes much better anyway.

Reference

Neuhouser, ML et al (2009). Multivitamin use and Risk of Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease in the Women's Health Initiative Cohorts. Arch Intern Med. Feb 169: 294-304.




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