Health "Expert" Displays Bias and Ignorance on ABC News

The headline read "Katz Recommends a Balanced Diet" and the lead paragraph in the March 21, 2006 story stated what is rapidly becoming well known - vitamins are big business. They are indeed, since Americans spend $7 billion a year on them. It may be true for many that they do this "in hopes of warding off colds, cancer and other diseases" but this fails to do justice to the far broader and deeper reasoning behind many people's consumption of supplements, even just vitamins.

Many people do actually use vitamin supplements quite intelligently, sometimes following professional advice, sometimes as the result of their own nutrition or health research. Of course, it is too much to claim or even hope that everyone uses them so well, the truth is that most people are less well informed and tend to take vitamins in ways that not only fail to provide much help but may actually do some harm.

Let's not get carried away on this point however, it is wise to keep it in perspective. Before any medical prescriber, naturopathic or orthodox, dares to criticize vitamin supplement consumers and proclaims vitamins dangerous, let them take a close look at the damage to health (even significant loss of life) attributable every day to pharmaceutical drugs. Before they attack the use and users of vitamins let them deal with the abuse perpetrated by drug companies and those who market their wares - yes, the very prescribers themselves.

In that same ABC News item mentioned above Dr David Katz, "Good Morning America's" medical contributor and associate professor adjunct in public health practice at Yale University, said "The most consistent finding we are seeing in the research is a lack of any medical benefits." Well, Dr Katz is a klutz. Evidently one can occupy such as post at Yale without understanding the difference between health and medicine. People don't take vitamin supplements for "medical benefits", but for health benefits. Then again, perhaps it was a slip and Katz was really saying he can't see how doctors can benefit from people consuming vitamin supplements.

Katz went on to make another medical faux pas in stating that: "Many people take high doses of vitamins to fight off colds, cancer, heart disease. And over and over again, we've looked for the active ingredient in these vitamins to find out what is working and have been unable to find anything." Fortunately most people can be credited with a better grasp on logic and sound thinking that Katz: failing to find is not the same as not existing. Further, the blindness imposed by the medical paradigm means many medical researchers are fixated on finding "the active ingredient". This illustrates how hopeless is their plight - they are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. Vitamins, Dr Katz, are active ingredients and they do their work in vivo by enabling a vast array of essential enzyme chains, the complexity of which is plainly beyond your ken.

Katz was reported as saying there is a potential danger to megadoses of popular vitamins and in this he is correct. However he illustrated the point with general references to some very poor studies. He referred to the following and my comments follow each statement quoted.

"Vitamin E, which many people believe protects against heart disease and cancer, has been found to increase risk of heart failure and cancer when people take anything more than 400 IUs a day." Actually vitamin E is probably the most controversial of the well-known vitamins and the evidence that it causes harm is at best very mixed. It probably was overhyped at one time and more care is warranted, so keeping intake below 400 IUs daily is a good idea for most people.

"Vitamin A can cause birth defects in high doses so it's potentially hazardous for women who may become pregnant. A 2002 Harvard study of more than 72,000 nurses showed that high doses of vitamin A led to a higher risk of hip fractures." The famous Harvard nurses study is not one of the better studies from that institution and the connection between vitamin A dosage and hip fracture rates is unconvincing and somewhat imaginative. Vitamin A should certainly not be taken in excess, as important as it is, and this fact is very widely known and promoted by vitamin suppliers and even marketers. Katz is really dredging for data in his scare mongering if he has to resort to this.

"Vitamin C is popular, especially during cold season, but there's no evidence that it prevents colds. It may shorten the duration by a very small amount, but not enough to notice. New studies have found vitamin C, if taken at the same time a patient is getting certain medical treatments, such as chemo for cancer, can interfere with that treatment." Actually the reasonably recent studies on the efficacy of vitamin C in relation to colds has supported its use. Those studies that failed to do so were seriously flawed and of no value. One would expect Katz to be an informed, critical consumer of that research but he appears unable to overcome his bias or agenda. As for the problem with taking vitamin C during chemotherapy, yes, there is certainly an issue here worth careful exploration. Vitamin C does seem to counteract some chemotherapy. Given that chemotherapy is simply the introduction of cell killing toxic chemicals, the vitamin C may be characterized as "trying to help" (if a little personification may be permitted) you by reducing its damage. This raises the whole question of the wisdom of using cytotoxic chemotherapy in the first place, so we'll leave this for another time. What is clear is that, as I have repeatedly said, doctors must ask and people must inform about all supplements and alternative medicines being consumed.

Finally, Dr Katz shows that he is either hopelessly confused and unable to think clearly on the topic or he simply wants to have an each way bet. He says that rather than rely on vitamins one should eat a well-balanced diet rich in vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Amazingly, he then recommends, in addition, taking a multivitamin!

To learn about nutritional supplements, find multiple published scientific studies, and discover guaranteed ways to improve your health I recommend you spend some time exploring a real health site. I wouldn't waste any more time with ABC News, Good Morning America or Dr David Katz.