Re: study sponsor-Re: Vitamin Use & Mortality Risk-New Study/Shame on AMA’s Archives of Internal Me

[Guest guest]

Jules,I have rarely looked and found that the list of people on the boards of any institution (such as National Cancer institute) where there weren't individuals who were either paid spokesmen, received

money for previous/current studies they are doing, currently employed by the drug companies. Be aware of it and look carefully of the scope and design of any study. Even ones sponsored by the anti-Pharma interests. One just has to read the details of this study and see glaring holes. Holes not mentioned in the big headlines online, the newspapers, on TV. Why not? I just wanted

people to be aware, take a closer look, before they ran out of the vitamin aisle and threw out their supplements. The article I mentioned about this study wasn't the only one I came across but maybe the third one I read. Now I wish I had saved those to place before you. I finally thought people should look more carefully. That's all. No hidden agenda. I do not work with anti-Pharma entities, never been paid by any such entities, never given any perks by any such entities, not sleeping with anyone from such entities.Once again I'll mention, in case you missed in my last message, I am a grateful user of drugs from the drug companies that have saved my life so far. L. KirsanowFrom: Jules Levin <julev@...>Kirsan Enterprises Inc. <ninawalte@...>; new lipidlist

< >Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 4:57 AMSubject: study sponsor-Re: Vitamin Use & Mortality Risk-New Study/Shame on AMA’s Archives of Internal Me

Here is the pdf of the published article where it discusses who paid for the study & describing the study & sponsors. There is no mention that the study is sonsored by pharma, read the pdf for yourself so where did ANH get the idea this was a pharma sponsored study.:

Financial Disclosure: Dr s is an unpaid member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the California Walnut Commission.

Funding/Support: This study was partially supported by grant R01 CA39742 from the National Cancer Institute and by grant 131209 from the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Fulbright program's Research Grant for a Junior Scholar (the last 2 of which were granted to Dr Mursu).

Role of the Sponsors: The sponsors did not play a role in the conception, design, or conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; or preparation, review, and approval of the manuscript.

Author Affiliations: Department of Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio Campus, Kuopio, Finland (Dr Mursu); Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (Drs Mursu, Robien, Harnack, and s); Department of Food

and Nutrition, Yeungnam University, Gyeongbuk, Republic of Korea (Dr Park); and Department of Nutrition, School of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway (Dr s). On Oct 12, 2011, at 2:32 PM, Kirsan Enterprises Inc. wrote:Well thank you.Of course I'm baised. I'm biased when it is a poorly designed study. If it is a well designed study that factors in many variables then I would have a hard time debating the results, no matter what the results. I will always look at who did the study, who paid for the study, etc.I am not a major anti-Pharmaceutical industry advocate. Without them I wouldn't be

here.L.

KirsanowFrom: Jules Levin

<julev@...>Kirsan Enterprises Inc. <ninawalte@...>Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 3:39 PMSubject: Re: Vitamin Use & Mortality Risk-New Study/Shame on AMA’s Archives of Internal Me

think what you want but my guess is you are biasedOn Oct 12, 2011, at 4:17 PM, Kirsan Enterprises Inc. wrote:Yes, I am aware. What are the alliances of the people doing the study? Doesn't change that it wasn't a great study with very little oversight as to what other health factors the women may have had, the quality of the supplements, what medications were they taking at the same time, etc. For the last several days, all I've seen are articles that now supplements are bad according to this study. What industry does that support?L. KirsanowFrom: Jules Levin <julev@...>ninawalte <ninawalte@...>Cc: Sent: Wednesday, October

12, 2011 2:58 PMSubject: Re:Vitamin Use & Mortality Risk-New Study/Shame on AMA’s

Archives of Internal Me

look at the ANH-Intl website and judge for yourself their allegiances.http://www.anhinternational.org/content/about-usOn Oct 12, 2011, at 10:37 AM, ninawalte wrote:Subject: NATAP: Vitamin Use & Mortality Risk-New StudyVitamin and Mineral Supplement Use in

Relation to All-Cause Mortality in the Iowa Women's Health StudyComment on "Dietary Supplements and Mortality Rate in Older Women"Goran Bjelakovic, MD, DMSc; Christian Gluud, MD, DMSc Arch Intern Med. 2011;171(18):1633-1634. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.459(Copied from Alliance for Natural Health Article)"Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary

supplements," unless there is a medical reason or deficiency of a particular nutrient, wrote the study authors, most of whom are affiliated with the University of Minnesota. The study, published in the American Medical Association's (AMA's) Archives of Internal Medicine, assessed the use of vitamin and mineral supplements in nearly 39,000 women whose average age was 62. The researchers asked the women to fill out three surveys, the first in 1986, the second in 1997, and the last in 2004, reporting what supplements they took and what foods they ate, and answering a few questions about their health.That's right, all the data was self-reported by the study subjects only three times over the course of the 19-year-long study. To say the data is "unreliable" would

be a generous description. This kind of "data" has no place in a valid scientific study.In the study, all of the relative risks were so low as to be statistically insignificant, and none was backed up by any medical investigation or biological plausibility study. No analysis was done on what combinations of vitamins and minerals were actually consumed, and no analysis of the cause of death was done beyond grouping for "cancer," "cardiovascular disease," or "other"—there was certainly no causative analysis done. The interactions of potential compounding risk factors is always tremendously complex—and was ignored in this so-called study."Multivitamin" can mean many different things, and of course changed tremendously over the 19 years during which this "study" was conducted. Were they high quality? Were the ingredients synthetic or natural? How much of each nutrient was taken? Were they really taken at all? How good is

anyone's memory in describing what took place over many years? One would assume that that the women's diets fluctuated greatly over the same period; when self-reporting only three times in 19 years, there is a great deal of information one would naturally leave out even if some of it was accurate. No analysis was done of the effect of supplements on the women's overall health, nor of their effect on women of other ages.According to Dr. Verkerk the Executive & Scientific Director of ANH-International;"This study is a classic example of scientific reductionism being used to fulfill a particular need. In this case, it's supplement bashing, a well-known preoccupation of Big Pharma — and an approach that appears to be central to the protection of Big Pharma's profit margins."Read Dr. Verkerk's article critical of the AMA's goals and scientific methodology here.In short, this study is less than useless: it is

dangerous, because it is being used by the media and the mainstream medical establishment to blacken the eye of nutritional supplements using poor data, bad analysis, and specious conclusions—otherwise known as junk science.------------------------------------