Vitamins & Supplements

Already a concern for older adults who lack adequate stomach acid to extract natural vitamin B12 from food, B12 deficiency may be more widespread than previously thought. The largest study to date of the effects of popular heartburn and ulcer medications on the risk of vitamin B12 deficiency reports a potentially serious problem. The study found patients who took the most popular acid-suppressing drugs, called proton-pump inhibitors or PPIs, for more than two years were 65% more likely to be deficient in vitamin B12.

Youve seen the TV commercials. A daily multivitamin supports heart and breast health, boosts your immune system and protects your eyes. A smiling couple feel pretty darned smart after learning that a study showing multivitamins reduce cancer risk used the very brand shes been making him take.

If youve been popping vitamin D supplements for benefits beyond bone health-such as preventing heart disease, cancer or diabetes-its too soon to know if those pills are really doing you any good. Thats the lesson, experts say, from a sweeping new review of 290 observational studies and 172 randomized trials of vitamin D, chronic disease and mortality. Although vitamin D deficiency was associated with a variety of health problems in the observational studies, the trials in which participants were actually given extra vitamin D failed to prove a benefit.

Dont count on extra vitamin D to get you through cold and flu season sniffle-free. Results from a large new clinical trial show no significant difference in upper respiratory tract infections between people randomly assigned to vitamin D supplements and those getting a placebo. The study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, also found no benefit from calcium supplements, either in duration of infection or severity of symptoms. The 759 generally healthy participants, ages 45-75, received either 1,000 IU of vitamin D, 1,200 milligrams of calcium, vitamin D plus calcium, or a placebo daily. Their days of illness and symptom severity were tracked over four winters.

A. Bess Dawson-Hughes, MD, director of Tufts HNRCA Bone Metabolism Laboratory, answers: The amount of calcium present is very small and so not very consequential. The other ingredients have negligible nutritional value, are commonly used, and I know of no evidence that they are unsafe.…

If youre eating a balanced diet and have no special health concerns, you probably dont need extra vitamin A of any kind. According to the Office of Dietary Supplements of the National Institutes of Health, Vitamin A is available in multivitamins and as a stand-alone supplement, often in the form of retinyl acetate or retinyl palmitate [preformed vitamin A].

Is your household throwing away hundreds of dollars worth of usable food every year? Thats the conclusion of a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, which warns that $165 billion of edible food is tossed in the trash annually and 40% of US food production never gets eaten. The leading culprit? Confusing food date labels, according to the report.

What are Americans getting for the $5 billion spent annually on unproven herbal supplements? Many of the pills may contain fillers such as powdered soybean, wheat, rice and even weeds, instead of the promised herbal remedies, according to a new DNA analysis published in BMC Medicine.

A. Brittany Loriquet, a dietetic intern in Tufts Frances Stern Nutrition Center, explains: Vitamins can be derived from food products or produced synthetically in a lab. Most multivitamins are made from synthetic vitamins, which are cheaper and easier to use than those from natural foods. There is no difference in the chemical structure between the synthetic form and naturally derived forms. To make a multivitamin, the vitamins and minerals are ground into a fine powder. …

With the US drought predicted to cause food-price increases of up to 5% next year, it might be time to take a harder look at whats in your grocery cart-especially those items that arent really groceries, such as pricey dietary supplements. Nutrition experts agree that its best for generally healthy people to obtain the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients you need from food, not pills.