Whenever I see a new study bashing supplements, I think to myself "slow news day"
Often, a given study is widely and gleefully misreported, with lurid headlines. Most of the studies involve inexpensive, over-the-counter multi-vitamins, like Centrum; a few looked at B-complex supplements and antioxidant combinations.
Rarely do the studies look at high-dose,
quality multi-vitamins. They don’t look at the effects of significant amounts of bio-available magnesium, low-levels of which are
known to be a cardiovascular risk factor; any studies that considered Vitamin K2 ?
now thought to play a significant role in arterial protection. And most of the studies used supplements which contained cheap, generic forms of beta carotene, instead of full-spectrum carotenoids... synthetic vitamin E, instead of mixed tocopherols... and folic acid and cyanocobalamin (B12), instead of preferred forms like 5-methylfolate and methylcobalamin.
Vitamin D doses probably didn’t exceed the paltry RDA of 400 IUs/day. Nor are promising nutrients like fish oil, Coenzyme Q10, Aged Garlic Extract, resveratrol, curcumin, olive leaf extract, or a host of others, considered.
So, it’s (IMO) journalistic malpractice to draw the conclusion that a study proves that
all supplements are worthless. It’s like saying that, based on the number of drugs recently recalled due to unacceptable side effects, we ought to conclude that medications as a whole are a dangerous waste of money, and should be avoided altogether.
Buried in the OP's linked article, is the mention (in Fig. 3) that it's a meta-analysis -- I’ll leave it to statisticians to critique the numbers-crunching in there, but suffice to say that meta-analyses are
notorious for selection bias and arbitrary rules of “weighting” studies for inclusion or validity.
Worth considering is that there’s brisk controversy, even in mainstream medicine, about the value of “RCTs”. That stands for randomized controlled trials. RCTs are usually of a short duration, due to the difficulty and expense of studying a trial intervention -- be it a drug, a supplement, a diet, a certain exercise regimen -- over a period of time, involving a sufficient number of individuals, to reach statistical significance.
For example: heart disease is a complex problem that develops over decades, and the effects of nutritional supplementation might be so subtle as to not be appreciated in small, short-term RCTs. Additionally, there may be benefits in a significant minority of individuals who are nutritionally-depleted, or genetically-predisposed, to higher vitamin requirements - which get lost when we look at aggregate populations.
What’s ironic is that there’s a Catch-22 when it comes to supplements. By law -- the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) -- supplement manufacturers are enjoined from making health claims. They are required to post this disclaimer: “These products are not intended to cure, treat or prevent any disease”. Instead, they’re relegated to using “weasel words” to make more modest claims like “supports heart health”.
So, in an exercise in twisted logic, a paper that purports to demolish the rationale for taking supplements for preventing cardiovascular disease, is only reinforcing the premise that prohibitions on disease claims for vitamins and minerals are already in place! Or, in other words, if they’re demonstrated to really have an impact on cardiovascular conditions, supplements would earn drug status, and hence be threatened with violation of DSHEA!
Is there bias at work here? Dr. Thomas Guilliams makes the case for systemic bias against supplements
here. He states “...even though the $300 billion pharmaceutical industry is 10 times larger than the supplement industry...we are advised...to ‘stop wasting our money’ only on the latter. Does this sound like unbiased, scientific advice? You be the judge.”
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