Why you shouldn’t believe what the media is reporting about vitamins
Health Bytes | 18 February, 2009 | Hot Topics:
Dear Health-Conscious Friend,
If I had to pick a catchphrase for Dr. Wright, I'd have to go with "Copy Nature." It's something he says – and writes – over and over again. And for good reason. You see, in his 30-plus years of practice, he's witnessed first-hand just how good the results can be when you use treatments that are either 100% natural, or, at the very least, identical to the natural versions. He's also seen the problems that can arise when you tamper with Nature.
One of the best recent examples of this occurred last October, when news broke about the supposed prostate cancer "risks" associated with selenium and vitamin E. In fact, the National Cancer Institute of America (NCI) actually halted a study on these two nutrients after researchers claimed that they increased prostate cancer and diabetes risk.
It was a rather odd finding, considering the fact that the study was launched because previous research showed that vitamin E and selenium resulted in 32% and 60% lower rates of prostate cancer, respectively. But rather than determining what factors may have accounted for this dramatic difference, the NCI simply halted the study and pronounced these two valuable nutrients as potentially dangerous.
There's more to the story, though.
Apparently, the type of vitamin E used in the study wasn't 100% natural. According to one article I read, "Instead of using the natural form of vitamin E considered most beneficial for health, d-alpha-tocopherol acetate, they used dl-alpha- tocopherol acetate. The 'd' designation in front of the 'alpha' indicates that the products are derived from natural sources such as vegetable oils or wheat germ. A prefix of 'dl'…shows that the vitamin has been synthesised from a petroleum base. Research has shown that the synthetic form of alpha-tocopherol acetate is considerably less effective…"
The article went on to say that "the form of selenium used for the test…is obtained as a byproduct of the processing of [copper, silver, or lead] ores." But, like vitamin E, the best form is a more natural one. So it's clear that the results of the halted selenium/vitamin E/prostate cancer study are anything but accurate. If only they'd copied Nature, things would very likely have been very, very different.
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Antoinette Pombo
Health Bytes Editor
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