Interesting choice of words. As far as I can tell, so long as they have the appropriate disclaimer and word the claims carefully there is nothing illegal about this activity in the nutritional supplement industry.
I'm talking about the issue of using (very) limited studies to make over-reaching claims about populations, not claims.
Some years ago, I read a book called The Vitamin Pushers I got from Paladin press. It was pretty good...
The two physicians who wrote the thing explained that America had "the best-nourished toilets in the world"
Yes, there's a lot of rubbish out there that ignores even basic biology. Megadoses of C is one of them - even if large doses were useful, it would have to be ingested over a period of time, not in one superpill. It just gets pi**sed out.
That if you had an actual vitamin deficiency, there were recognizable symptoms, and if you didn't have them...You didn't have a deficiency.
That's essentially true for those deficiencies and symptoms, but nutritional science has come along way since then. Severe deficiencies in micronutrients can result in these disease states (like scurvy) but with at least some nutrients there is almost certainly cumulative "damage" through chronic insufficiency - ie enough to avoid a deficiency state, but not the optimal intake.
The fact the optimal intake almost certainly varies from person to person (sometimes dramatically) makes it an absurdly difficult area to say much with certainty.
Seems to me almost all the published testing that has been reported in various science articles over the years indicate the same thing...Either the product had no effect whatever, or it was actually harmful.
No, it's all over the place, one study says one thing, another study says something else. The article for example cites some studies on Vitamin E,
here's a recent contrary view.
Or how about
this one - which found that Vitamin E supplementation
decreased mortality in smokers - but only the elderly. In middle-aged smokers it
increased mortality.
I can provide plenty more studies, for and against, virtually any nutrient.
Nutrition is complicated.
