Apparently some people in the supplement industry are up in arms about a B-vitamin study showing that supplemental B vitamins did not reduce risk of cardiovascular events or death.
Of course, this response isn't surprising coming from industry, but some of their criticisms are amusing. Dr. Daniel Fabricant criticized the study's exclusion criteria, saying that many of the study's subjects were taking beta blockers (drugs that help control blood pressure) or statins (drugs that help control cholesterol) at the same time.
Dr. Fabricant, this shouldn't matter. This is what randomization is all about. If you randomly assign your subjects to the treatment or placebo (which was done in this study), the two groups will balance themselves out. In fact, in a summary report of the study here, it states, "the groups did not differ significantly regarding age, gender, clinical, laboratory or angiographic findings, cardiovascular risk factors or concomitant medication".
Supplemental B-vitamins have been pushed in the past because they are known to lower homocysteine. Homocysteine is a protein in the blood that has been found to be correlated with heart disease; the higher your homocysteine level, the higher your risk of disease. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that homocysteine causes heart disease. In fact, this study, along with many others, have failed to show any benefit from lowering homocysteine levels with B vitamin supplementation.
As I mentioned in another blog, we tend to get a little bit crazy in our society when it comes to vitamin/mineral supplementation. We automatically think more is better (although more could actually be worse). We expect that taking a multivitamin/mineral is going to stop us from getting cancer or heart disease or some other terrible condition. But that's not the purpose of a multivitamin/mineral. Really, the reason to take a multivitamin/mineral is more as a safeguard against potential deficiencies. This means the doses don't need to be very high. Doses near the RDA should be more than adequate in a multivitamin (with some exceptions, like vitamin D).
Remember, everything in moderation....