The bottom line of the scientific reports mentioned in the article on the anti-vitamin/supplement side is taking vitamins and supplements is a waste of money unless you have some chronic vitamin deficiency.
If you read the article carefully though you see that really modern science has a hard time with vitamins at a number of levels. They interfere with other treatments, for example. Researchers expected to see a group of 38,000 women who took a supplement to show some improvement in life expectancy - in fact the use of supplements created a slight decrease.
And then there is the placebo effect. Do the supplements make me actually feel better or do I just think I feel better?
I think this is really the big question.
First off, what does or can science know about what I feel? And, in the very first place, that's where you have to start out. How do I feel? And, I think, only you can objectively get a handle on that.
As a user of some vitamins and supplements I have had to develop my own criteria for determining my "place" in the "how do I feel world." I believe my model to be far superior to these silly little "studies" that really don't have a handle on what's being studied and measured in the first place since, according to the article "people eat foods with multiple nutrients that can interact with supplements and skew results" and "observational trials can only show an association, not cause and effect."
So here's my real scientific model - and granted its just my model - but it seems to work for me.
Every day, more or less and with a two year hiatus for osteitis pubis when I cycled, I run an average of about 5 km. Over long periods of time I run the same route. I've done this for years both with and without supplements.
The point here is that I have developed a good subjective idea of how my health is based on these runs. I know how I feel doing it, when I stop to cool down, how long it takes to cool down, what effects temperature, season, weather, etc. have on me and so on. I have been doing it for about 22 years so I also have a perspective on age. And, finally, I understand its effect on any stress I might be feeling - work or family related.
Now, over the last 22 years and just running, I would expect that my over all performance to fall - it would take longer to run the same distance just because I am older. However, I also determined that timing myself is a stress I don't need so, at the end of the day, I just keep track of the effort I feel I am putting out on my run - heart rate, sweating, level of subjective effort, cool down time, etc.
So all this leaves me with what I will call the idea of an average run - I don't feel good or bad, I just do it and forget about it, and all the metrics I have are within what I will call a normal range.
This is my average healthy baseline - a proper balance point, if you will, amongst everything that is me.
I can tell when I go above it, say with more enthusiasm or feeling really good about something or running competitively, and I can tell when I go below it, say with a cold or flu or fever.
Modern medicine is allopathic - that is it treats symptoms with opposites. For example, if you have a fever then modern medicine gives you, say, aspirin, to reduce the symptom of the fever - the notion of the aspirin is doing the "opposite" of what the fever is doing.
But without knowledge of what's causing the fever aspirin is really just like painting over rust - it does not solve the problem and the problem may very well come back.
So instead of thinking about my own health in allopathic terms I like to think of what I do as moving the baseline. Things that are good for me move the baseline up, i.e., I feel even better. Things that are bad, say like drinking or eating too much, move it down.
(Mind you I do not think that the position of the baseline necessarily means I will live longer - just better while I am living.)
So my world of vitamins and supplements revolves around moving the baseline up in some significant way, i.e., one I can measure or feel.
So one way I do this is physical injury - the bane of any runner. Any runner will suffer sprains and twisted ankles - you step on a rock or in a pot hole, you swerve to avoid traffic or a dog, that sort of thing.
Now over all I would expect that suffering this kind of injury (as opposed to something like osteitis pubis) would be more or less consistently increase with age everything being equal: there are always pot holes, dogs, traffic and so on and, getting older, my joints and bones would be less flexible, my mental focus and eyesight would lessen, and so on. This was true, for example, with my dad who ran into his sixties.
So one of the metrics I use for taking supplements is what effect it has over years on the rate and type of injuries. Subjectively it seems that I have been able to significantly reduce the level of running problems that I have related to injury.
I "feel" this in a number of ways. Less impact on my joints (fewer injuries as well as aches and pains) and my feet. Fewer strains. Less need of stretching (I seem to be naturally more flexible). And so on.
Could this be a placebo effect? Possibly. But I would think that I would still be subject to the same amount of external injury forces, e.g., pot holes or traffic.
So over all I feel much better than I did, say five years ago. I suffer less doing the same job (running 5km).
Now I am not saying I run faster or that I will magically live longer. But I am saying that over all I feel better than I did five years ago - and I am obviously five years older.
The bottom line here is that I think the modern allopathic western medicine model is completely and totally wrong.
I have been able to develop a mental balance point for my health (and not just for running). I use that as a basis for seeing what effect, over a long term, some supplement has on me.
The same sort of baseline can be used for, say, mental concentration and focus, for strength, for any number of things.
But modern medicine does not encourage people to think for themselves - not for them to think about achieving any sort of baseline for their health. Instead they fix symptoms - and when the fixes cause more problems, they fix those, and so on and so on until you have older people taking ten or fifteen medications a day. They have no baseline and are instead on a drug-induced roller coaster of highs and mostly lows.
So just studying a collection of random people doing a collection of random supplements over a random time is not going to give helpful results.
Now I am not suggesting my life or health is perfect or that what I am doing will make me live longer.
What I am suggesting is that I have a much better idea of where my health is and what my behavior (including the consumption of supplements) does to it over time.
I am also saying is that "medical science" is so much voodoo for the most part - patching over things they don't understand with more things they don't understand. Sure they can fix a broken bone but many things, the placebo effect above all others, have no current medical explanation.
Instead the model should be one of teaching people to understand their own health - to create a baseline of health for them to measure results against. They need to teach that health is not something that a pill fixes - the goal should be no or as few pills as possible - not a pill for any possible deviation from what I (or someone else) thinks I should be feeling at any given time.
Health is not an instantaneous point - its a steady, long term baseline. Drugs and treatments that don't move the baseline treat only symptoms and don't cure any underlying problems (and yes, obviously this does not apply to things like antidotes for poisons or snake bites).
People are not taught to think "why does by my back hurt?" Instead they are taught "my back hurts now, what can I do to fix it now." This thinking really precludes any sort of true cure because all the focus is on the symptom and not the cause. (And this has leaked down to today's young people who can only rely on pills or doctors to handle their own health...)
Studies like those the WSJ describes are useless and, from what I can see, self serving with respect to the allopathic form of medicine. The studies are just measuring random things and creating random correlations which government will use to take away our choice and right to use supplements.
At 54 years old I have been running for 22 years (I also swam competitively from about age 12 until 17). I started writing about this about six years ago. My health "baseline" has improved steadily (I would have expected it to decline due to age) since I started really thinking about this and working on improving it...
Of course you probably don't believe any of this.
But ask yourself this: if medical science is so great why don't the doctors live longer than the rest of us?
See this table - doctors live as long as other professionals - not longer.
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