Multivitamins and Cancer… The Truth You Won’t Hear on TV

A major study has just been released.  The nightly news has been all over it. It’s made its way into every major newspaper. But dig a bit deeper…

You’ll see it’s just another case of “don’t believe everything you read.”

The study appears in JAMA (Journal of the Medical Association). The data came from the Physicians’ Healthy Study II. It involved 14,641 male doctors over age 50. About 1,300 of the men had a history of cancer when the study started in 1997.

Half the men took a multivitamin for up to 10 years. Half took a placebo.  During the study, they all stayed active, ate a healthy diet, and were fairly lean.

At the end of the study, the “vitamin men” had 12% fewer cancers overall. They also had 12% fewer deaths from cancer. Prostate cancers were down, but not by much.

Sounds good on the surface, right? Not so fast.  Let’s look closer at the details.

The multivitamin they studied was…