Vitamins: It's The Dose That Does it
March 2009
There is a spin to most media reporting on vitamin research. The recent
anti-vitamin media blitz, led by the Associated Press and USA Today, provides
yet another demonstration. "Vitamins C and E don't prevent heart disease" - The
Associated Press, November 9, 2008 and USA Today. With a paternalistic pat on
the head, the media once again seeks to send you off to play with the
reassurance that, well, vitamin therapy HAS been tested, and it just does not
work.
Nonsense. Thousands upon thousands of nutritional research studies provide
evidence that vitamins do help prevent and treat serious diseases, including
cancer and heart disease, when the nutrients are supplied in sufficiently high
doses. High doses are required. Low doses fail. Says cardiologist Thomas Levy,
M.D.: "The three most important considerations in effective vitamin C therapy
are dose, dose, and dose. If you don't take enough, you won't get the desired
effects."
Effective doses are high doses, often hundreds of times more than the US
Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) or Daily Reference Intake (DRI). Abram
Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D., comments:
"Drs. Wilfrid Shute and Evan Shute recommended doses from 400 IU to 8,000 IU of vitamin E daily. The usual dose range was 800 to 1600 IU but they report that they had given 8,000 IU without seeing any toxicity."
The Shutes successfully treated over 35,000 patients with vitamin E.
All the recent, much touted JAMA study does is confirm what we already know: low
doses do not work. The doses given were 400 IU of vitamin E every OTHER day and
500 milligrams of vitamin C/day. Try that same study with 2,000 to 4,000 IU of
vitamin E every other day (1,000 to 2,000 IU/day) and 15,000-30,000 mg/day of
vitamin C and the difference would be unmistakable. We know this because
investigators using vitamins E and C in high doses have consistently reported
success.
Low doses do not get clinical results. Any physician, nurse, or parent knows
that a dose of antibiotics that is one tenth, or one-hundredth, of the known
effective dose will not work. Indeed, it is a cornerstone of medical science
that dose affects outcome. This premise is accepted with pharmaceutical drug
therapy, but not with vitamin therapy. Most of the best-publicized vitamin E and
C research has used inadequate, low doses, and this JAMA study falls right into
line.
High doses of vitamins are deliberately not used. Writes
Robert F. Cathcart III, M.D.:
"I have been consulted by many researchers who proposed bold studies of the effects of massive doses of ascorbate (vitamin C). Every time the university center, the ethics committee, or the pharmacy committee deny permission for the use of massive doses of ascorbate and render the study almost useless. Seasoned researchers depending upon government grants do not even try to study adequate doses."
The most frequently proffered reason is the allegation that "high doses of
vitamins are not safe." That is a myth. Twenty-five years of national poison
control statistics show that there is not even one death per year from vitamins.
Check the research literature and see for yourself exactly who is being harmed
by vitamins. Aside from the pharmaceutical industry, virtually nobody. Half of
Americans take vitamin supplements every day. So where are the bodies?
Decades of physicians' reports and controlled research studies support the use
of large doses of vitamins. Yet to hear the media (and JAMA) tell it, vitamins
are a Granny's folk remedy: a buggy-and barrel-stave technology that just
doesn't make it.
In the broadcast and print media, vitamin therapy is marginalized at best and
derided at worst. Is this merely laughable, or is there method to it? One may
start by asking, who does this serve? Could it possibly be the media's huge
advertising-cash providers, the pharmaceutical industry? Pharmaceutical
advertising money buys authors, ad space, influence, and complicity.
Unfortunately, this is as true in the newspapers as it is in the medical
journals.
Let the news media begin by disclosing exactly where their advertising revenue
comes from. It may explain where the spin on their articles comes from, too.
Source : http://www.orthomed.org/
Editorial Review Board:
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. Damien Downing, M.D. Harold D. Foster, Ph.D. Steve
Hickey, Ph.D. Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D. James A. Jackson, PhD Bo H. Jonsson, MD,
Ph.D Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. Erik Paterson, M.D. Gert E. Shuitemaker, Ph.D.