Monday, October 10,2 011 the Archives of Internal Medicine released a study, the Iowa Women’s Health Study, claiming that vitamin use might lead to an earlier death. The authors of the study admitted they started out with a hypothesis that supplements wouldn’t add to life. It appears, although it is not revealed, that the supplement users actually lived longer than the non-supplement users. But the authors just manipulated the data until they got what they wanted and more: supplements not only didn’t help—they were killers!

The impact of the blatantly flawed study will be to foster apathy and fear on the public, who are misled to think that taking a simple multivitamin supplement may cause them to die sooner.

Although the study was flawed in significant ways, calling into question the science and objectivity of methods used, that didn’t stop national media, including PBS, from citing the study after headlines like the one from Fox News:  Are Your Supplements Killing You?

A study published in July 2011 in the European Journal of Nutrition with the purpose to prospectively evaluate the association of vitamin/mineral supplementation with mortality from cancer, cardiovascular conditions, and all-causes arrived at a completely opposite result.

In lay terms, this European study indicated that long-term users of antioxidant vitamin supplements had a 48% reduced risk of cancer mortality and 42% lower all-cause mortality.  Yet the media did not even bother to mention these impressive findings. Apparently they thought a better headline grabber would be to frighten users of dietary supplements with the blatantly flawed Iowa Women’s Health Study.

When held up to standards for scientific research, the Iowa Women’s Health Study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine was flawed in many ways:

• Questionnaires were used to gather data—it was not a direct intervention study. This is an important difference because questionnaires are notoriously unreliable in accurately capturing information. Contrast this approach to actively providing a group of test subjects a vitamin supplement, following these people over time to ensure compliance, and then evaluating the results.
• The supplement portion of this questionnaire was not validated, meaning they did not validate that the supplement questions accurately assessed supplement use. No objective measurements of compliance or non-compliance (such as evaluating blood vitamin levels) with vitamin use were undertaken to confirm if the questionnaires accurately reflected whether people were or were not taking supplements.
• The data were “observational”: women in Iowa were asked what supplements they were taking three times over eighteen years—that is every six years. Who remembers what they have taken over six years?
• Data was anecdotal: you didn’t have to say what you were taking specifically, just vague terms like “multivitamin.” (We do not know because study participants were not asked if the vitamins synthetic or natural. How much did they take? Did they really take it, and for how long? Did they take it to stay healthy or because they had become very ill, perhaps with cancer).
• All of the data was “adjusted” by the authors using methods of their own choice. The first adjustment is for “age and energy,” whatever “energy” means in this case.  The second adjustment means that if you had a healthy lifestyle and took vitamin C and lived longer, the longer life was attributed largely to the healthy lifestyle and not to the vitamin C.  Also, after the study’s authors “adjusted” the results for healthy eating, every supplement except calcium, B complex, and vitamin D became a contributor to an earlier death, according to undocumented and completely loony math, and only calcium actually lengthened life. Not surprisingly, almost none of this—except possibly for the the use of copper supplements taken by 24 women at the end of the study—could be claimed to be statistically significant, even using the authors’ own methods.
• Authors of the study admit they did not factor in the increased intake of dietary supplements that occur in response to the development of symptoms or diagnosis of serious disease. Stated differently: If a woman was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and began ingesting 40 supplements daily, but died six months later, she would have been counted as being a heavy supplement user who died prematurely. Women who did not begin supplementing until after symptoms and/or disease manifested would have been classified from a statistical standpoint as being part of the group that ingested large quantities of supplements but died early nonetheless.  This flaw by itself could render the overall findings of the Iowa Women’s Health Study  that was published by the Archives of Internal Medicine meaningless because much of the lay public today mistakenly associates dietary supplements as something very important to initiate after serious disease appears.
• A sizeable minority of the supplements users were also taking drugs that have since been proved to be highly dangerous—patented hormones in particular—although no attempt whatever was made to control for drug use. In the Iowa Women’s Health Study, about twice as many women who took multivitamin/mineral supplements also took non-bioidentical hormone replacement therapy which is associated with early mortality This flaw alone may have rendered the study’s findings meaningless from both a statistical and real world standpoint.

To pretend to control for so many factors but not to control for drug use—and to get through peer review this way—is a sad commentary on the state of medical research today. Could this be related to the overwhelming influence of drug companies on medical research in general?

Does that sound like crazy talk? Mike Adams’ NaturalNews.com points out that the study’s authors, the Archives of Internal Medicine “receives millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies,” part of the $400 million that goes from drug companies to medical journals, and that the major media trumpeting the study in scary headlines also stay afloat from the $4.7 billion spent in Pharma-to-consumer ads (all of this data is from 2008, and is actually higher now).