Daily Multivitamin Shown to Lower Risk of Cancer in Men

The medical profession has vilified the use of supplemental vitamins and minerals for decades, as the American Medical Association prefers administering prescription pharmaceuticals to promoting optimal nutrition to prevent disease. In the past, research studies have been quick to negate any beneficial outcome from taking a multivitamin, or have even found negative consequences from vitamin and mineral supplements. In virtually every case, the studies were poorly run or funded by a Big Pharma concern.

In the first in-depth analysis of its kind, data from the Physicians Health Study II has been presented to the Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). A team of researchers from the Division of Aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital have determined that daily use of a basic multivitamin reduced the risk for total cancer occurrence in a population of men followed for more than a decade. Researchers conducting the nutritional analysis noted "Multivitamins are the most common dietary supplement, regularly taken by at least one-third of U.S. adults. The traditional role of a daily multivitamin is to prevent nutritional deficiency... the combination of essential vitamins and minerals contained in multivitamins may mirror healthier dietary patterns such as fruit and vegetable intake." The vast majority of children and adults receive suboptimal intake of vitamins and minerals due to a diet high in nutrient-depleted processed foods.

Multivitamins provide statistically significant cancer risk reduction in physician study. It is important to note that the typical 'one-a-day' multivitamin, though providing positive results in this review, is still a grossly inefficient vehicle for obtaining optimal intake of naturally existing vitamins and minerals. Dr. Linus Pauling first advanced the 'triage theory' to posit that nutrient depletion over the course of years and decades directly promotes the development and progression of chronic diseases including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia. In this analysis, researchers followed 14,641 male physicians, initially aged over 50 years for a period of 11.2 years. All were supplemented with a daily multivitamin or a placebo. During the study period, 2,669 were diagnosed with some form of cancer. A detailed analysis of the data indicated that men taking a multivitamin had a modest eight percent reduction in total cancer incidence.

The research authors concluded "Although the main reason to take multivitamins is to prevent nutritional deficiency, these data provide support for the potential use of multivitamin supplements in the prevention of cancer in middle-aged and older men." This review examined cancer risk using a multivitamin containing minimally recommended daily dosages of synthesized vitamins and minerals, and still provided a statistically significant disease risk reduction. Nutrition experts recommend an optimized daily intake from a whole food based multivitamin and mineral supplement to dramatically lower the risk of cancer and most chronic diseases. Sources for this article include: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1380451 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017123912.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017123914.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017123711.htm http://www.huffingtonpost.com