Up and Down Media Reports

The media roller coaster continued with recent news reports on the good and bad of nutritional supplements – all without providing any real context.

In one study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers combined either niacin (a form of vitamin B3) and a statin drug or the drug Zetia with a statin (a combination known as Vytorin). The niacin combination worked far better in terms reducing the thickening of the carotid artery, a major blood vessel.

As good as niacin is, the finding was neither new nor surprising. Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, discovered that niacin lowers cholesterol back in 1955 – and it has been approved by the FDA for that purpose for more than 50 years.

Meanwhile, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study claiming that supplements of the B-vitamin folic acid increased the risk of cancer. The study was a statistical shell game. Folic acid allegedly increased the risk of cancer by 38 percent, but the results were not statistically significant.

If you read the actual study, not just the panicky newspaper and web news, you would have learned that 70 percent of the subjects were current or former smokers, all of the subjects had a high risk of cancer, and nearly all of the cases were lung cancers. Omitting this information was nothing less than sloppy journalism. So, if you smoke, should you stop taking your vitamins or stop smoking?