We are all aware of articles that appear in the mainstream media regarding the ‘dangers of taking vitamins’ [sic]. Routinely these articles appear in national newspapers and are written in the style of a report on a scientific paper. Journalists often include lines such as ‘according to scientists’ and ‘researchers have shown’ to give them the appearance of credibility and authority. However, the content contained within such articles is designed to deliberately obfuscate the productive endeavour of educating the public on the benefits of good nutrition from original scientific research. This is because nutritional research consistently highlights that chronic diseases considered incurable by mainstream medicine, are in fact a direct result of deficiencies of vitamins and minerals. Awareness of this would reduce the need for expensive drug treatments touted by the hugely powerful pharmaceutical corporations.
A few years ago such an article appeared regarding the dangers of vitamin C and how it could cause cancer. The reports suggested that high doses of the vitamin were mutagenic because in one study it damaged DNA. That was quite true. But further investigation exposed the article as a series of half truths. Firstly, the experiment was done in a test tube (in vitro) and not in the human body (in vivo). This makes the results questionable because the human body is incredibly complex and no cell culture model can possibly hope to replicate this complexity. Secondly, the experiment exposed the cells and their DNA to high concentrations of vitamin C that would never be found in cells inside the human body. Vitamin C is an acid, and at very high concentrations, obviously is damages cellular components just as any concentrated acid would.
The pharmaceutical industry is not interested in competition for its expensive drugs and has a history of attacking anything that causes deviation from its well choreographed, funded and researched narrative based around toxic drugs. The vitamin C debacle is a good example of sound scientific research deliberately being manipulated to add weight to a paradigm that ignores or ridicules any questioning voice or legitimate alternative. Death by doctor is now the third leading cause of death in America1, whereas nutritional supplements account for zero deaths each year. There is a headline in there somewhere, but I doubt we will see it any time soon in a national newspaper. The truth is that vitamin C is incredibly safe and has virtually no known toxicity in the human body. High doses are protective of a number of disease including cardiovascular disease and cancer.
RdB
1Starfield, B. 2000. Is US health really the best in the world? Journal of the American Medical Association. 284(4): 483-485
