Sunday, April 06, 2008
Research
Kenneth Williams, NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 1, 2007
"Antioxidants Tied to Death Risk" screamed the headline across the news wires. This, after the Center for Clinical Intervention Research at Denmark's Copenhagen University Hospital reviewed 68 studies on nearly a quarter-million people and "found" that synthetic supplements – not fruits and vegetables in everyday diets – increase one's risk of death.
"The review did not pinpoint any biochemical mechanism that may be behind the increased death risk. It may be that ‘by eliminating free radicals from our organism, we interfere with some essential defensive mechanisms,' the study concluded," Reuters reports.
The report says that beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E, given singly or combined with other antioxidant supplements, significantly increase mortality by "about" about 5 percent.
However, that number is significant, because it is the very percentage that delineates the threshold of whether a medical finding is by chance, or not.
As the Economist explains in its article "Why So Much Medical Research is Rot": "... So many health claims that look important when they are first made are not substantiated in later studies [because] each result is tested separately to see how likely, in statistical terms, it was to have happened by chance.
"If that likelihood is below a certain threshold, typically 5%, then the convention is that an effect is ‘real.' And that is fine if only one hypothesis is being tested. But if, say, 20 are being tested at the same time, then on average one of them will be accepted as provisionally true, even though it is not."
This raises questions about the validity of the Denmark review. First, did the risk of death go up more or less than 5 percent? "About" 5 percent is not exactly a scientific designation. Second, a review of 68 studies can in no way ascertain the risk of death for antioxidant supplements due to the fact that the original studies may have each been testing different hypotheses.
To put it another way, the Economist writes: "People born under the astrological sign of Leo are 15% more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastric bleeding than those born under the other 11 signs. Sagittarians are 38% more likely than others to land up there because of a broken arm.
"Those are the conclusions that many medical researchers would be forced to make from a set of data presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. At least, they would be forced to draw them if they applied the lax statistical methods of their own work to the records of hospital admissions in Ontario, Canada, used by Dr Austin.
"Dr Austin tested 24 hypotheses, two for each astrological sign. He was looking for instances in which a certain sign ‘caused' an increased risk of a particular ailment. The hypotheses about Leos' intestines and Sagittarians' arms were less than 5% likely to have come about by chance, satisfying the usual standards of proof of a relationship.
"However, when he modified his statistical methods to take into account the fact that he was testing 24 hypotheses, not one, the boundary of significance dropped dramatically. At that point, none of the astrological associations remained."
John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, in Greece, explained to the Economist that researchers looking for risk factors for diseases are not aware that they need to modify their statistics when they test multiple hypotheses. The consequences are that a lot of observational health studies — those that go trawling through databases, rather than relying on controlled experiments — cannot be reproduced by other researchers."
Daniel Fabricant, a vice president of the Natural Products Association, agrees, saying reviews of existing studies, called meta-analysis, often work but in this case the process was biased because "there are many other factors that could contribute to mortality that were simply not assessed."
Mike Adams of Healthranger.org simply calls the study a fabrication. "Faking a vitamin study to show supplements as harmful is extremely easy to pull off," he writes.
He says you can get any results you want by:
Use synthetic forms of the vitamins and avoid using natural, food-sourced vitamins. These synthetic vitamins – which are really just industrial chemicals – may be called "Vitamin E" or "Vitamin A" or even "Vitamin C" but they have no functional resemblance to the real vitamins that occur in nature. Every single study over the past two decades that has sought to discredit Vitamin E, for example, focused on using synthetic Vitamin E in order to show harm.
Cherry-pick the results you want by simply eliminating all previous studies that showed positive results for vitamins, and include only previous studies that showed negative results.
Confuse people with statistics. "The reporting on this particular study, for example, confuses absolute risk with relative risk. Vitamin A, according to the reports [in the Denmark] study, increased mortality risk by 16 percent. But that is a relative risk number, meaning that if 1 person out of 100 normally died, then 1.16 people out of 100 would die when taking these synthetic Vitamin A supplements. In other words, it might not even be one additional person out of 100, or even out of 1000."
Adams adds: "Conventional medicine researchers try to blur the line between "junk vitamins" and "quality vitamins" by classifying all nutritional supplements as "vitamins," regardless of what they're really made from. By discrediting a few synthetic chemicals, they can effectively dissuade the masses from taking any vitamins."
Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, said the study and the data studied are both flawed because more than two-thirds of the previous research that was examined involved people with heart disease, cancer or other risks who were being treated to see if the supplements worked.
"This kind of approach does not work," he said. "Over the years it has become clear from these clinical trials that antioxidants don't work in disease treatment."
The Denmark review went further, however, and concluded that "by eliminating free radicals from our organism, we interfere with some essential defensive mechanisms."
Nothing could be farther from the truth says Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of NewsMax's Blaylock Wellness Report.
In his special report "Prevent Cancer Before It's Too Late,", Dr. Blaylock explains why ingesting antioxidants to eliminate free radicals is in fact crucial to life, as well as cancer prevention: "Every cell in the human body houses an elaborate antioxidant system created to stop free radicals from destroying its cells and tissues. Those elements can be altered by what we eat. So poor nutrition can lead to defective function, while a good diet can result in maximal protection."
He continues: "Aside from the antioxidant enzymes and molecules we are all born with, the body imports a host of other antioxidants via your diet - or at least it should.
"Vitamins come to mind when we think of antioxidants - especially C and E. But it is vital to remember that every nutritional supplement has both an optimal and toxic dose. Very high levels of any of these three minerals could cause harm - or even death."
But the Center for Clinical Intervention Research doesn't report whether or not the people in the 68 studies it reviewed were taking toxic doses of synthetic supplements.
In fact – and the Economist and Dr. Blaylock would agree – the "study" doesn't really tell us anything.
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