Science That Distorts Research...And Setting The Record Straight

I was recently in England to lecture on nutrition and to sign copies of my book, Stop Prediabetes Now. (See www.stopprediabetesnow.com.) While there, another negative study on vitamins was published, one that claimed vitamin supplements increased the risk of death. The study’s findings were repeated there and around the world – uncritically. Some consumers, interviewed on TV, were actually afraid to continue taking their vitamin supplements.

The study, by Goren Bjelakovic, MD, and published via what is known as the Cochrane Database, was a rehash of his highly criticized study last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was old news – and bad science.

Bjelakovic’s findings of a so-called significant increased risk of death from vitamins were not significant at all. The study wasn’t even a study – it was a statistical machination of 67 previously published studies, many of which had shown clear benefits from vitamin supplements. Bjelakovic focused on studies in which deaths occurred, choosing to ignore more than 400 studies (from his original pool of research) in which no deaths occurred. In poker, this is called stacking the deck, or outright cheating. Many of the subjects in the studies were seriously ill or terminal, vitamin dosages varied greatly, and the duration of supplement use ranged from a month to years. Bjelakovic had no idea of the causes of death, which might have included car accidents, interactions from prescription drugs, and children suffocating their terminally ill parents.

During the same week, I happened to visit the food hall at Harrod’s, the pricey London department store that prides itself on both quality and expensive goods. Curious, I looked at the ingredients list on tins of cookies. Incredibly, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (i.e., trans fats) were the first or second ingredient in most of these products. Basically, Harrod’s magnificent food halls had turned into a hall of the worst kinds of junk food. Trans fats are arguably the most dangerous ingredient in processed foods.

Bjelakovic would have provided a far greater service if he had focused on the dangers of artificial food ingredients, such as the trans fats in Harrod’s cookies and hundreds of other common manufac-tured food products. When we take vitamin supple-ments, we often do so in part as a “countermeasure” to protect ourselves against some of the harmful additives whose presence is often not questioned 
at all.

A Safer Therapy for Brain Cancer

Politics aside, the diagnosis of brain cancer is awful. And although there are survivors, the results of conventional treatment are pretty dismal. When I heard that Senator Ted Kennedy had been diagnosed with malignant glioma, I immediately thought of a dear friend who was diagnosed in 2001 with malignant brain cancer. He remained pretty sharp mentally, aside from some forgetfulness, until shortly after he began radiation therapy, when he rapidly went downhill.

The current therapeutic vogue for brain cancer is the gamma knife, which is supposed to be a precise beam of radiation that destroys the tumor and nothing else. So they say. There is collateral damage – if not from the radiation striking normal cells, then from the creation of toxic necrotic disease as the cancer cells die. In 20 years, the gamma knife will probably be viewed as barbaric as we now view bloodletting.

A few days after Kennedy’s diagnosis made the headlines, I accidentally came across a medical review paper published last year, in which the author described cell, animal, and three small clinical (human) studies using gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) to treat gliomas and other types of brain cancers.

GLA is an anti-inflammatory plant oil sold at every health food store in the county. In the human studies, GLA was injected directly into the tumors daily for up to 20 days (obviously something you can’t do at home). Most of the people treated with GLA were alive and well almost three years after diagnosis. They experienced few if any side effects.

None of this means GLA is a cure for brain cancer, or any other type of cancer, for that matter. However, it is another very promising alternative and complementary therapy – one I suspect that Senator Kennedy’s doctors probably have never heard of. (By the way, I did email Senator Kennedy’s office about the GLA study.)

Skeptical? You can read the actual journal article for free by going to www.pubmed.gov, typing “Das UN glioma” (without the quotation marks) into the search box. Share this important article with your doctor and your friends. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to encourage the use of a safe and nontoxic therapy for brain cancer.

Reference: Das UN. Medical Science Monitor, 2007;13: RA119-RA131.