The big question is: do vitamins have healing power? The jury is still out on that one.
In a recent study, scientists tracked large groups of people to see if taking vitamins reduced the risk of getting certain diseases.
When vitamin B supplements are put under the microscope researchers find “no evidence” that they prevent heart disease, strokes or cancer.
Vitamin B also “does not appear to improve cognitive function” in healthy people, or those who are starting to go a little dotty.
As for helping people with depression? It wasn’t particularly useful for that either.
But when it came to improving depression, or dementia the researchers say more work is needed.
There is evidence that taking vitamin C and zinc lozenges could help people get over a cold a bit faster. “The evidence for zinc lozenges is very strong,” said Harri Hemila at the University of Helsinki in Finland. But, there’s not good evidence these supplements will keep people from getting sick in the first place.
To know if people were low on vitamin D, scientists would have to agree on one thing – exactly how much vitamin D people need.
And, perhaps surprisingly, scientists are still debating this.
“There is a lot of animated discussion right now,” said Professor Katherine Tucker, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell.
Part of the debate is that it’s unclear what vitamin D is beneficial for.
A team brought together by the Institute of Medicine in the US several years ago wrote that vitamin D was important for bone health.
But, they said, other conditions, like diabetes, depression or cancer, could not be “linked reliably or consistently” to vitamin D. Yet, other scientists disagree.
What about vitamin E?
“The new evidence says, no, don’t take it,” Professor Tucker said.
A decade ago there was a big push for people to take vitamin E, but then scientists realised it actually wasn’t that helpful and might even increase the risk of some kinds of cancers.
Finally, we know that eating a diet full of fruits and vegies packed with different nutrients can help us live longer and prevent heart disease.
But what happens when these vitamins are put into one big multivitamin?
“There’s been some big studies that show they didn’t really have major effect,” Professor Tucker said.
One large study recruited 14,000 older men and gave half multivitamins while the other half were given a placebo.
The men were tracked for more than a decade. And, after all that work? There was no difference in rates of heart attacks and heart disease between the two groups.
Curiously, the men who took the multivitamins had a slightly reduced risk of cancer.
But the researchers said this was not significant because other large studies have been mixed.
But Professor Tucker wasn’t ready to throw out the multivitamins just yet as she said a few large studies into multivitamins have been done in doctors and they might have better diets than your average Joe.
So, for people who aren’t eating so well, “it doesn’t hurt to take a multivitamin for insurance,” she said,
Overall, it doesn’t look like vitamins in a pill do all that much.
But studying the benefit of taking vitamins in large groups of people is really tricky, and all the research can’t really tell if particular individuals should be taking vitamins or not.
