ABC on Friday published the opinion of Dr Eric Rimm, associate professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
According to Dr Rimm, only a change in diet and lifestyle will provide the nutritional boost necessary, and fundamentally unhealthy people seeking dietary remedial action through supplementation are wasting their time. He says people should instead focus on the classic diet-exercise combination.
To read the NutraIngredients-USA.com article published on Monday, click here .
Dr Rimm's comments, as expected, generated a mixed reaction.
However, coming on the back of a number of much sharper attacks on supplements, the comments do not reveal anything that has not been said before. As such, they are not accompanied by the shock factor that has shaken the industry in the past.
According to feedback posted on ABC and subsequently also sent to this publication, it is "disappointing that the mainstream media is still partly enslaved by the same, tired old ideology that it has been dominated by since at least World War II, to wit: eat a balanced diet, take a poor-quality 'generic' multivitamin and you're good to go".
"Nobody is saying take a supplement, don't eat or exercise," wrote James Gormley, senior policy advisor at the consumer group Citizens for Health.
The problem is that in today's nutritional climate, foods are calorie rich and often nutritionally bankrupt, he said.
"Harvesting food from soil that is depleted of minerals and other co-factors for food to contain even the minimum RDA has been absent for more that 80 years in the USA," stated another comment to NutraIngredients-USA.com, from Sheikh Mohamed of Columbia University Medical Center.
"It is nonsense to think that the American diet will prevent vitamin and mineral deficiencies as well as preventing diseases."
Supplement slamming
The latest 'supplement slamming' is reminiscent of a number of reports published in recent years, which had generated a whirlwind of negative media attention around the use of supplements.
The hardest hit to the supplements industry came in 2005, following a widely publicized meta-analysis at the tail end of 2004 that linked vitamin E with an increased risk of all-cause mortality (Annals of Internal Medicine 2005 Jan 4;142(1):37-46).
The study stated that daily vitamin E doses of 400 international units (IU) or more can increase the risk of death and should be avoided.
The day after the report came out, 20 percent of US consumers taking vitamin E supplements stopped taking them. Sales of the vitamin fell some $102m.
For more information on the vitamin E study, click here .
In 2007, an article published in the New Scientist magazine and written by Dr Lisa Melton from the London-based registered charity, the Novartis Foundation, claimed that the benefits of antioxidant supplements, from vitamins and carotenoids to polyphenols, are just a 'myth'.
The article stated that, according to results of randomized clinical trials, when antioxidants have been extracted from fruits and vegetables and put into supplements, they do not always produce the benefits associated with antioxidants, and may even be harmful.
The article was published online and in print edition of New Scientist. The print edition sells an average 165,000 copies around the world.
To read more on this, click here .
Earlier this year, attention was again focused on the efficacy and safety of antioxidant supplements after the publication of a meta-analysis of 67 randomized trials with antioxidant supplements
The report, published in April in the prestigious Cochrane Systematic Review, stated that vitamins A and E, and beta-carotene may increase mortality risk by up to 16 per cent.
The meta-analysis had originally been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2007, Vol. 297, pp. 842-857) last year and attracted criticism from both inside and outside of the dietary supplements industry.
To read the NutraIngredients-USA.com article on this, click here .
