Large Study: Taking vitamins from supplements does not offer mortality benefits, has potential risks

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  • aokoye
    aokoye Posts: 3,495 Member
    Daisy_Girl2019 wrote: »
    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamins/

    "Read enough nutrition news, and you’ll see that not all scientists agree on multivitamins. Some say that there’s not enough proof that multivitamins boost health, so they don’t recommend them. Other scientists point to studies that seem to show a link between multivitamin use and increased risk of death. But those studies are flawed. Looking at all the evidence, the potential health benefits of taking a standard daily multivitamin seem to outweigh the potential risks for most people."

    The antivitamin journal said this in their
    Conclusion    :
    Use of dietary supplements is not associated with mortality benefits among U.S. adults.
    But, they did not mention that they actually proven it actually shows mortality risks.

    You do realize that a. what you quoted isn't a journal, b. arstechnica isn't a journal and, c. Annals of Internal Medicine isn't an "antivitamin journal" right?
  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    Daisy_Girl2019 wrote: »
    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamins/

    "Read enough nutrition news, and you’ll see that not all scientists agree on multivitamins. Some say that there’s not enough proof that multivitamins boost health, so they don’t recommend them. Other scientists point to studies that seem to show a link between multivitamin use and increased risk of death. But those studies are flawed. Looking at all the evidence, the potential health benefits of taking a standard daily multivitamin seem to outweigh the potential risks for most people."

    The antivitamin journal said this in their
    Conclusion:
    Use of dietary supplements is not associated with mortality benefits among U.S. adults.
    But, they did not mention that they actually proven it actually shows mortality risks.

    I'd suggest that when comparing journal articles, rather than looking for .edu, you look up impact factor. Impact factor is a much more reliable heuristic for what journals will be publishing reputable work.

    The risks for certain vitamins and minerals don't seem particularly odd. Vitamin D can easily be toxic, the LD50 is surprisingly low compared to things like caffine.
  • deannalfisher
    deannalfisher Posts: 5,600 Member
    apullum wrote: »
    Daisy_Girl2019 wrote: »
    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamins/

    "Read enough nutrition news, and you’ll see that not all scientists agree on multivitamins. Some say that there’s not enough proof that multivitamins boost health, so they don’t recommend them. Other scientists point to studies that seem to show a link between multivitamin use and increased risk of death. But those studies are flawed. Looking at all the evidence, the potential health benefits of taking a standard daily multivitamin seem to outweigh the potential risks for most people."

    The antivitamin journal said this in their
    Conclusion:
    Use of dietary supplements is not associated with mortality benefits among U.S. adults.
    But, they did not mention that they actually proven it actually shows mortality risks.

    What you just posted is not a scientific study. It is general information about vitamins. It was probably written by someone who is knowledgeable about the topic, although we don't know because there is no author named, so we cannot look up that person's credentials. We also don't know when it was written, since it doesn't include a date of publication. Unless it was written or revised within the last couple days, it does not take into account the study the OP was discussing. That study was published on April 9, 2019. The link you posted is therefore still not relevant to the OP's discussion.

    You have actually posted an excellent example of why you should not take something as the end-all, be-all final word just because it is on a .edu domain. It is hopefully accurate, but it is not scholarly (i.e., peer reviewed science written for other scholars, which often goes into depth about a specific research question).

    Your nutrition class instructor appears to have done you a great disservice. This person taught you a blanket "rule" about evaluating sources, and that rule is not correct. There is not much you can learn about a source just by looking at the top level domain on which it's posted. Scholarly articles are frequently posted on .com sites. .edu sites do not guarantee that a source is either accurate or scholarly. Depending on exactly what it is you're looking at, a .gov site's content may be influenced by partisan politics about what content can or cannot be posted. The top level domain means almost nothing when it comes to evaluating the quality of a source.

    Scholarly sources are articles printed in peer reviewed journals OR books printed by academic presses (often, but not always, affiliated with a university; Google the press if you're unsure).

    OP's article was printed in Annals of Internal Medicine. If you are not familiar with academic journals, you can read more to find out whether they are peer reviewed. From the Annals of Internal Medicine's About Us page: "Material published in Annals is subject to peer review and the journal greatly appreciates the efforts of the over 18,000 volunteers in our reviewer database who provide critical input into our peer review process. Acceptance rates for original research range from 6-8% in recent years." (https://annals.org/aim/pages/about-us) This means that each article submitted to the journal has been reviewed by 2-3 scholars in the field. It also means that Annals is very selective, publishing only a small percentage of articles that the reviewers and editors deem to be the highest quality research.

    Your link has not been through this rigorous vetting process. We don't know who wrote it or what their credentials are. We don't know when it was published or updated. It doesn't cite any sources, so we can't tell where the information came from or check the sources ourselves. Peer reviewed articles, on the other hand, always include the authors' names, their professional credentials (i.e., their highest degree and/or current job), the exact day of publication, and a complete list of properly cited references.

    Peer reviewed publications also require authors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. This disclosure allows you to evaluate whether "the authors' outlook could be skewed." You can see that the study the OP discussed was funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health, which is a US government agency. Note that the NIH is a very large, frequent, and prestigious funder of a great deal of medical research. The Annals website offers even more detail than that, though; the authors and editors were all required to disclose all relationships or financial interests whatsoever with relevant organizations. The full disclosure forms are easily accessible on the Annals website. You can also evaluate the authors' credentials, as they are all listed. All of the authors have terminal degrees in their fields and all are affiliated with Tufts University. One, incidentally, is also affiliated with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health--where your link was posted.

    If you went to the Annals site or the PubMed site to read the original study, what you saw was the abstract, not "somebody's outlook about the original journal." The abstract is a type of summary that precedes a journal article. It is written by the article's authors. Note that one study published in a journal is an "article," while the entire publication is a "journal;" it is incorrect to refer to a single study as a journal.

    You may not have been able to read the full text of the article if you are not currently on a university campus, or if your university doesn't subscribe to any of the databases that host the article. It is unfortunately extremely common for academic research to be behind a paywall. This is one function of the abstract: to provide a brief summary for people who cannot or do not want to read the whole article. However, if you go to a local university's library and and speak with a reference librarian, they may be able to help you locate the full text of the article. If you are a student, your campus library can generally get you academic articles for free even if your university does not subscribe to the relevant databases. Universities typically have relationships with other universities that let them borrow or access one another's materials.

    I would strongly encourage forgetting what this instructor in your nutrition class taught you about evaluating sources. It seems highly flawed and is leading you to favor lower quality sources over higher quality ones. You have multiple knowledgeable people on this thread who are trying to explain to you how academic publishing works. If you are a student, you need to visit your campus library and talk with a research librarian about how to find and evaluate scholarly sources.

    this is about all i could find on that harvard link in general - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/about/ - but since the specifically cited page didn't actually link to any studies

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