West Michigan's Morning News
A New Major Study on Vitamins
Take your daily vitamin yet. This is West Michigan's morning news. Steve Kelly, Brett Piquita, Lauren Smith, Dr. Jim Applegate, back on the live line with us former family physician of the year and the whole state of Michigan. Good morning. Doc, thanks for doing this. Good morning. So vitamins, we've been taking these things, multivitamins for years, but there's a new major study that is out. What do we need to know? Well, this was a study done by the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, at least that initiated the study, because one third of us, greater than 30% of people, take multivitamins on a daily basis. I know I do. And most of my friends also do. So they look at over 400,000 people over the age of 20. The average age of people that they looked at was 61, so it's a study more in our age group. And they were generally healthy. They didn't have a lot of chronic diseases, so they didn't really go into the study group in depth about what they meant by that. And the most important thing to realize about the study is what the endpoint was, what they were looking at. And it turns out that if you take a multivitamin, the endpoint that they looked at, which was on death and cancer, was not changed. So taking a multivitamin, according to this study, does not change your risk of death or of cancer. And that's interesting data, but not majorly different from what we knew about multivitamins just generally. But would you still, and are you still going to tell your patients to take them? Well, that's the thing. That's what I say. We need to focus on the endpoint. So the endpoint that they looked at was death and dying. They didn't look at any other factors. So if you're taking it so you don't die earlier, not going to make a difference. But there are innumerable studies in the medical literature and good studies that show that taking a multivitamin or taking certain vitamins do help. The advantage of a multivitamin is you don't have to follow the research. You don't have to figure out what the last ping pong ball research study showed us. Taking a multivitamin sort of covers everything. But there are enough studies in my clinical opinion out there that says, "Hey, supplementing your diet with a multivitamin may help you around the margins, may help you function better, may help your immune system function better, say you don't get it sick, may help your joints a little bit, may help your muscles a little bit." None of that was looked at. So they just looked at death and cancer. So I think that you should still continue to take a multivitamin, especially in the crazy lifestyles that we have. We're all flying around 90 miles an hour with a hair on fire, stuff in pizza in our mouth, and in our children's mouth, never getting our green leafy vegetables during the week. And so why not? It's not an expensive thing to do to cover all your bases so that maybe it helps you function the world. Not going to change death and dying from this study, or it's not going to change cancer from this study, but I think it does help your body function better. Drs. May be a silly question. Is there the chance of going to overboard on a vitamin? I mean, is there something you should still maybe talk to your doctor and figure out if you're doing too much of something? Well, there are always the fat soluble vitamins, which are A, D, E, and K, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K that you can theoretically overdose on. But you have to be pretty compulsive to do that. You're almost at the swallow bottle a day. And I know they're, you know, if you look at the literature, they always find people that do that, but they're not, you know, those are the people at the margins. Those are not mainstream people. So I think, you know, take a multi vitamin a day is very inexpensive. It's a way that you don't have to worry about, you know, making sure you get your green leafy vegetable. You know, if you, I remember a little bit older, I remember going with my grandmother, I was born in South Philadelphia going down to the broad street market and, you know, looking at foods every Wednesday in an Italian household, at least in our Italian household, was spinach. They were always at some form of spinach to make sure you got your green leafy vegetable. I remember that from growing up. We've lost all those disciplines that our grandmothers knew about how to eat and how to cook. What they were doing is they're trying to supplement you with vitamins, but you don't get very, very much vitamin from a pizza. So that's why I'm still going to be a proponent of taking multi vitamins, especially your children because you know, Shmitty, flying around, trying to take your kids to all their activities and then trying to get them to eat something healthy, going there impossible. Yeah, talk about it last night, you know, relatedly, I'm strong to the finish because I eat my spinach. There we go. Dr. Jim Applegate, always great stuff. Thank you.