HEALTH ALERT #1
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Antioxidant Study: The Real Truth About Supplements
2. Vitamins May Reduce Children's Cancers
3. Dry Cleaning Chemicals Risky
4. Green Tea and COX-2 Inhibitors Slow Prostate Cancer
1. Antioxidant Study: The Real Truth About Supplements
"Antioxidants Tied to Death Risk" screamed the headline across the news wires. This, after the Center for Clinical Intervention Research at Denmark's Copenhagen University Hospital reviewed 68 studies on nearly a quarter-million people and "found" that synthetic supplements — not fruits and vegetables in everyday diets — increase one's risk of death.
"The review did not pinpoint any biochemical mechanism that may be behind the increased death risk. It may be that ‘by eliminating free radicals from our organism, we interfere with some essential defensive mechanisms,' the study concluded," Reuters reports.
The report says that beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E, given singly or combined with other antioxidant supplements, significantly increase mortality by "about" about 5 percent.
However, that number is significant, because it is the very percentage that delineates the threshold of whether a medical finding is by chance, or not.
As the Economist explains in its article "Why So Much Medical Research is Rot": So many health claims that look important when they are first made are not substantiated in later studies [because] each result is tested separately to see how likely, in statistical terms, it was to have happened by chance.
"If that likelihood is below a certain threshold, typically 5%, then the convention is that an effect is ‘real.' And that is fine if only one hypothesis is being tested. But if, say, 20 are being tested at the same time, then on average one of them will be accepted as provisionally true, even though it is not."
This raises questions about the validity of the Denmark review. First, did the risk of death go up more or less than 5 percent? "About" 5 percent is not exactly a scientific designation. Second, a review of 68 studies can in no way ascertain the risk of death for antioxidant supplements due to the fact that the original studies may have each been testing different hypotheses.
To put it another way, the Economist writes: "People born under the astrological sign of Leo are 15% more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastric bleeding than those born under the other 11 signs. Sagittarians are 38% more likely than others to land up there because of a broken arm.
"Those are the conclusions that many medical researchers would be forced to make from a set of data presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Peter Austin of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. At least, they would be forced to draw them if they applied the lax statistical methods of their own work to the records of hospital admissions in Ontario, Canada, used by Dr Austin.
"Dr Austin tested 24 hypotheses, two for each astrological sign. He was looking for instances in which a certain sign ‘caused' an increased risk of a particular ailment. The hypotheses about Leos' intestines and Sagittarians' arms were less than 5% likely to have come about by chance, satisfying the usual standards of proof of a relationship.
"However, when he modified his statistical methods to take into account the fact that he was testing 24 hypotheses, not one, the boundary of significance dropped dramatically. At that point, none of the astrological associations remained."
John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, in Greece, explained to the Economist that researchers looking for risk factors for diseases are not aware that they need to modify their statistics when they test multiple hypotheses. The consequences are that a lot of observational health studies — those that go trawling through databases, rather than relying on controlled experiments — cannot be reproduced by other researchers."
Daniel Fabricant, a vice president of the Natural Products Association, agrees, saying reviews of existing studies, called meta-analysis, often work but in this case the process was biased because "there are many other factors that could contribute to mortality that were simply not assessed."
Mike Adams of Healthranger.org simply calls the study a fabrication. "Faking a vitamin study to show supplements as harmful is extremely easy to pull off," he writes.
He says you can get any results you want by:
- Use synthetic forms of the vitamins and avoid using natural, food-sourced vitamins. These synthetic vitamins — which are really just industrial chemicals – may be called "Vitamin E" or "Vitamin A" or even "Vitamin C" but they have no functional resemblance to the real vitamins that occur in nature. Every single study over the past two decades that has sought to discredit Vitamin E, for example, focused on using synthetic Vitamin E in order to show harm.
- Cherry-pick the results you want by simply eliminating all previous studies that showed positive results for vitamins, and include only previous studies that showed negative results.
- Confuse people with statistics. "The reporting on this particular study, for example, confuses absolute risk with relative risk. Vitamin A, according to the reports [in the Denmark] study, increased mortality risk by 16 percent. But that is a relative risk number, meaning that if 1 person out of 100 normally died, then 1.16 people out of 100 would die when taking these synthetic Vitamin A supplements. In other words, it might not even be one additional person out of 100, or even out of 1000."
Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, said the study and the data studied are both flawed because more than two-thirds of the previous research that was examined involved people with heart disease, cancer or other risks who were being treated to see if the supplements worked.
"This kind of approach does not work," he said. "Over the years it has become clear from these clinical trials that antioxidants don't work in disease treatment."
The Denmark review went further, however, and concluded that "by eliminating free radicals from our organism, we interfere with some essential defensive mechanisms."
Nothing could be farther from the truth says Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of NewsMax's Blaylock Wellness Report.
In his special report " Prevent Cancer Before It's Too Late, " Dr. Blaylock explains why ingesting antioxidants to eliminate free radicals is in fact crucial to life, as well as cancer prevention: "Every cell in the human body houses an elaborate antioxidant system created to stop free radicals from destroying its cells and tissues. Those elements can be altered by what we eat. So poor nutrition can lead to defective function, while a good diet can result in maximal protection."
He continues: "Aside from the antioxidant enzymes and molecules we are all born with, the body imports a host of other antioxidants via your diet — or at least it should.
"Vitamins come to mind when we think of antioxidants — especially C and E. But it is vital to remember that every nutritional supplement has both an optimal and toxic dose. Very high levels of any of these three minerals could cause harm — or even death."
But the Center for Clinical Intervention Research doesn't report whether or not the people in the 68 studies it reviewed were taking toxic doses of synthetic supplements.
In fact — and the Economist and Dr. Blaylock would agree — the "study" doesn't really tell us anything.
© NewsMax 2007.
Editor's Note:
- Special: To Get Dr. Blaylock's Report on Antioxidants and
Cancer — Plus 5 Bonus Reports FREE, Click Here.
2. Vitamins May Reduce Children's Cancers
Women who want to be good mothers can begin by spending pennies a day at the drugstore to buy multivitamins. Just-published Canadian research shows that if women take a daily multivitamin before and during pregnancy, they slash the chances of their children developing childhood cancers including leukemia and brain tumors.
The new research shows that cheap drugstore vitamins can prevent cancer and also forestall many birth defects. It adds weight to previous research showing that supplements confer lifelong health benefits to developing fetuses. Dr. Gideon Koren, a director at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, said, "This is almost too simple an idea for people to take seriously, but they should."
The research shows that if mothers take a daily multivitamin containing folic acid, they lower their children's risk of the most deadly childhood cancer, neuroblastoma, by 47 percent. The risk of leukemia, the most common pediatric cancer, is lowered by 39 percent, and the chances of a brain tumor are lowered by 27 percent.
Editor's Note:
3. Dry Cleaning Chemicals Risky
Freshly dry cleaned clothes look great, but those crisp creases could be costing you your health. Perchloroethylene, or perc, the chemical solvent that's most often used in dry cleaning, is a neurotoxin and a possible carcinogen. You could be breathing it in each time you put on a dry cleaned garment, and perc fumes could be seeping throughout your house and endangering your entire family.
Long-term exposure could be deadly. “You're at risk for neurological effects, liver and kidney illness, and increased cancer risk,” said Judith Schreiber, Ph.D. and the chief scientist of environmental protection for the New York Attorney General's office.
Perc is a favorite of dry cleaners because it doesn't fade or shrink delicate fabrics. But perc vapors can reach high levels in a closed car even during the drive home from the cleaners, causing dizziness, headache and nausea. Once clothes are stored in closets, fumes seep throughout the house. In tests, high levels of perc have been found throughout houses after dry cleaning had been brought home.
Consumer Reports magazine studied perc emissions from dry-cleaned jackets and were startled at the results. “We found that there was a small, but definitely increased risk of cancer from wearing freshly dry-cleaned clothes.
Consumers can avoid most exposure to perc, since most clothing, although not all, can be either hand washed or washed in the washing machine. The Care Labeling law only says that one suitable method of cleaning must be stated on the label, not all, and many garments labeled “dry clean only” can be safely washed. For those that must be dry cleaned, cut exposure to perc by:
- Ironing out wrinkles and airing out garments between wearings to cut trips to the dry cleaners.
- Notifing your dry cleaner about the origin of specific stains, so they can use fewer chemicals to treat them.
- Removing dry cleaned clothes from plastic bags as soon as you get home and airing them out in a well-ventilated area or a room not connected to the rest of the house.
4. Green Tea and COX-2 Inhibitors Slow Prostate Cancer
Drinking a nice warm cup of green tea has long been touted for its healthful benefits, both real and anecdotal. But now researchers have found that a component of green tea, combined with low doses of a COX-2 inhibitor, could slow the spread of human prostate cancer.
In the March 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrate that low doses of the COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib, administered with a green tea polyphenol called pigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), can slow the growth of human prostate cancer. Their experiments were performed in cell cultures and in a mouse model for the disease.
“Celecoxib and green tea have a synergistic effect — each triggering cellular pathways that, combined, are more powerful than either agent alone,” said Hasan Mukhtar, Ph.D., professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin and member of Wisconsin's Paul Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We hope that a clinical trial could lead to a preventative treatment as simple as tea time.”
Previous research has linked the cyclooxygenase-2 enzyme, commonly known as COX-2, to many cancer types, including prostate cancer, said Mukhtar. Mukhtar and his colleagues have previously shown COX-2 inhibitors like celecoxib (known under the brand name Celebrex™) suppress prostate cancer in animal models. COX-2 inhibitors also have been shown to cause adverse cardiovascular effects when administered at high doses over long durations.
In 2004, Mukhtar and his colleagues demonstrated that green tea polyphenol EGCG has cancer-fighting abilities of its own. Their study, published in Cancer Research, showed that EGCG can modulate the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1)-driven molecular pathway in a mouse model for human prostate cancer, pushing the cells toward death.
“We believed that COX-2 inhibitors may still prove beneficial if used in combination with complementary agents,” Mukhtar said. “Our studies showed that the additive effect of green tea enables us to utilize the cancer-fighting abilities of COX-2 inhibitors, but at lower, safer doses.”
“Prostate cancer typically arises from more than one defect in the cellular mechanics, which means that a single therapeutic might not work fighting a particular cancer long-term,” Mukhtar said. “If tests in human trials replicate these results, we could see a powerful combined therapy that is both simple to administer and relatively cost effective.”
The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.
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