It’s a nice way of avoiding bureaucracy. If people are “allowed” to think critically, then they can evaluate the risks and possible benefits to decide for themselves what they need. Science doesn’t mean that I trust people, medicines, or procedures based upon them having been vetted by others and chosen for me.
It's aniceeasy way ofavoiding bureaucracydefrauding the gullible and anyone else who doesn't have time or inclination or temperament to run millions or billions of biochemical experiments on themselves.
You make it sound like any kind of research done by a third party is some kind of nefarious scheme, and isn’t worth looking into. If everyone had to figure out what was safe and effective on their own, and pharmaceutical research didn’t exist we certainly wouldn’t be living on average to 82.
People are allowed to think critically. People shouldn’t be allowed to lie in an official capacity, especially when it comes to things they say will cure your ailments. That’s just predatory, and isn’t worth tolerating as a society.
So I guess as long as you’re exempting yourself from society, enjoy your herbs and ear-candling?
But there is no substitute for good, nutritional food.
And what do we do when we have allergies, have intolerances, and have malabsorption? Most people have lactose intolerance. Many people have fructose malabsorption, which means high-fructose and high-sucrose diets can cause zinc, tryptophan, and serotonin depletion.
Yeah, this study may or may not be on to something, but the description in the article where it studied a large number of supplements reminds me of this comic:
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How do I do this? Or maybe this is only the narrative you are trying to assume we both work from.
Why would people need to do this on their own? Maybe choosing between isolated trial-and-error versus an overarching authoritarian hierarchy are not the only valid options.
These are, strictly speaking, not problems of scientific methodology. They are reasons why I detest all commerce, generally. I never believe anybody who wants to sell anything to me.
People here seem to love telling me that I’m not participating in society, I’ve gotten rather tired of this. What you might be confused about is that nobody lies or makes claims for me to take any herbs, supplements, or medicines. I simply source what I decide I need and use it. There is no gullibility required. But as a free adult person, the decisions and risks are mine to manage, and no one elses.
Also the chart on Information is beautiful.
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That’s more like it!
I like the bubbles, but they seem to not really delineate (debubbleate?) in an open-ended way just what the health effects are, and instead focus upon only one “claim” in each instance. Even with scientific study of the effects, what constitutes a “benefit” or “detriment” is still a matter of opinion. A more useful layout might be to simply list every observed physiological effect for each substance.
Milk, even enriched, has very little Vitamin D. An 8-ounce glass of fortified milk typically has 100 IUs, which is 5-10% of the 1000-2000 IUs that are now recommended. (Older studies recommended 400 IUs, but more and more evidence seems to say that that’s much too low.)
Pretty much the only rich natural source of Vitamin D is fatty fish. 6-12 oz of tuna or swordfish will give you the recommended amount. In contrast, you’d need 20 eggs, or 60 ounces of beef liver to get the same amount by other sources.
The main way we get Vitamin D, of course, is from the sun, but the majority of the populations of Europe and North America aren’t exposed to enough sun on exposed skin to manufacture enough.
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Hmmmm… it seems like a neat graph, but unless I’m misunderstanding it it isn’t very helpful.
If I click the “Bubble Size” toggle to change what the size of the bubble represents, why should that affect where it is on the y-axis, which is how strong the evidence that it is good for you is?
Yet that’s exactly what it does. For example, when the bubble is sized by “Popular Interest,” Calcium+Vit. D shows up below “Good.” But when the bubble is sized by “Scientific interest,” Calcium+Vit. D shows up much higher, just below “Strong.” So what is the evidence for Calcium+Vit. D, “good” or “strong?”
And when I try to get more information, I can click on a circle to get “the lead study.” Is it implying that it’s basing this information on a single study per supplement? Because that’s nothing at all for some of the well-studied supplements.
There may be more there that I’m not getting, but it seems to be prioritizing “beautiful” data than meaningful data.
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Thank you Thank you. I was going nuts searching the Interwebs for this exact page.
Right and the small amounts added to milks, cereal, flours and other foods are only intended to make up the shortfall not be your primary source. And it’s worked pretty well. When was the last time you saw some one with rickets wandering around an industrialised country?
Your “primary source” can only be the sun. It’s not a question of making up dietary “shortfalls,” because it’s impossible to eat your way to enough vitamin D unless you eat large quantities of oily fish every single day, which most people don’t do.
So the point is, if you don’t get enough sun exposure on non-protected skin for large amounts of the year, which is the case for most Americans and Europeans, you can’t get enough vitamin D without further supplementation, regardless of the tiny amounts added to milk or other products.
Here’s a 2008 article published in Clinical Nutrition which says
Vitamin D deficiency is now recognized as a pandemic. The major cause of vitamin D deficiency is the lack of appreciation that sun exposure in moderation is the major source of vitamin D for most humans. Very few foods naturally contain vitamin D, and foods that are fortified with vitamin D are often inadequate to satisfy either a child’s or an adult’s vitamin D requirement.
Saying that we don’t see people with rickets is largely irrelevant. Rickets can be prevented by fairly small quantities of vitamin D and adequate calcium, and may indeed have been “cured” largely as a result of fortification. Yet there are many, many other maladies associated with low vitamin D, including (from that same article above) growth retardation (in children), osteopenia, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, proximal muscle weakness, pancreatic and esophageal cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and tuberculosis.
All of these are problems that are absolutely still around today, even in “an industrialized country.”
For the three bone-related issues the authors note, patients are often “misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, dysthymia, degenerative joint disease, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other diseases.”
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Dr. Tim Byers presented his research this past Monday, April 20th, 2015 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Philadelphia. My opinion is this study is not new at all—and complete bullshit! (Oops…I can’t believe I just said that.) Read more here… #prostatecancer #menshealth #health http://bit.ly/1KcUAYf
Another blogger points out that the “meta-analysis” doesn’t exist; no new study happened; no new data were reported:
In a follow-up post, McBurney wrote that there was, in fact, no presentation of new study data by Byers at the AACR meeting, and that “The entire news cycle linking multivitamin/mineral supplements with cancer risk seems to have been stimulated by the university press release alluding to a commentary published in 2012.”
I confirmed McBurney’s account with Garth Sundem in the University of Colorado media relations department this morning. He told me that there is no new meta-analysis, and that the “study” referred to in these news accounts is indeed the 2012 paper cited by McBurney (apparently a narrative review of the evidence and not study per se) from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Sundem said he was surprised to see that his news release was “immediately and aggressively sensationalized” by the media, and described a “ripple effect, almost like a game of telephone tag, where news outlets, especially in the UK, seemed to give increasingly more sensational accounts of the study without ever going back to the original source.” He described Byers as being “just as horrified as you’d expect any academic researcher would be” by the hype surrounding the non-study.
The PR flak who sent out a meaningless press release in the hope of easy publicity now blames that publicity on media – including Boing Boing – who reprinted the press release.
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