A recent study of 15,000 older male doctors indicated that those who took daily multivitamins as opposed to a placebo “dummy pill” experienced 8 percent fewer cancer cases. The purpose of this randomized, double-blinded clinical trial was to test whether multivitamin intake had an effect on cancer, even though the purpose of consuming such vitamins is to avoid nutritional deficiencies. While the difference in cancer cases was statistically significant, the study’s lead author acknowledged that taking a quotidian multivitamin is not the most beneficial way to lower cancer risk: in accordance with many other studies on the effectiveness of vitamins(some of which link vitamin consumption to adverse health effects). In this study, prostate cancer was unaffected by multivitamin use while all other cancers were reduced by 12 percent. The effect on cancer deaths was not statistically significant.
The very first "vitamin" was created by Casimir Funk in 1911 from brown rice to function as a medicine for beriberi. Were Funk alive today, would he approve of the mass production and globalization of vitamins made from all kinds of sources, consumed by those who do not even have diseases? If the multivitamins of today are little more than ineffective as the article suggests, it raises the question of how to justify importing them from China(amid the other drawbacks of supporting China's manufacturing industry). The rise of vitamins seems to have accompanied the rise of cancer, along with diabetes and obesity and the worsening of the American diet. This "dummy pill" described in the study does not have a definition as to what it is made of, and could be sucrose or another substance that may actually increase the risk of cancer. The study examined whether or not the doctors took vitamins, but it did not examine the diets of the subjects and therefore a major lurking variable could be present. In the documentary Forks Over Knives, disease presence is broken down into geographic locations with a large range, indicating that countries who eat mostly local whole foods have much lower disease rates than the more Westernized countries. If this practice is resumed in other areas, vitamins would likely not be as desired.
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