Vitamin Supplements shorten life

Overdo it. Who eats healthy, shortened his life take another vitamin pill to swallow on top.
The advice "do not benefit, not hurt to try" does not apply to vitamin supplements. From a twenty-year study of nearly forty of fifty plus women distract women who swallow vitamins, shorter lives than those who do not. Especially multivitamins, folic acid, vitamin B6, magnesium, zinc, copper and iron seem to shorten life, Finnish and U.S. researchers warn this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The women participated in the Iowa Women's Health Study, a long-term health in which all aspects of health are analyzed. At the start of the study in 1986 women were on average about sixty years old, and twenty years later there were 15,500 of them deceased.

The excess mortality in women swallowing the vitamin was not large, but still significant, the researchers said. During the course of the study, 41 percent of them died compared with 40 percent of non-swallow multivitamin samples.

But the difference was greater when things like hypertension, diabetes and obesity were taken into account. And iron supplements for women who took DES, the probability of premature death is greatest, and also dose dependent: the more iron, more premature deaths.

Although the study only women applied, expected study Jaakko Mursu (University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio, University of Minnesota) that vitamin supplements men too much extra to offer will have, at least in western countries where there are no food shortages and vitamin deficiencies only in sick , malnourished people avoid. "Unless you have such vitamin deficiencies, there's no reason to vitamins to swallow," he told Reuters. One possible exception is vitamin D, which women's lives may be slightly extended.

Mursu admits that there is a weak side is his study: to data on vitamin use to come, women had on three occasions in the study (1986, 1997 and 2004) can indicate whether or not vitamin supplements were used in the past year . Such a survey through questionnaires may give a bias if the memory is playing tricks on participants. "But with the knowledge I would not recommend healthy people on a regular basis vitamins to swallow."