The Archives of Internal Medicine reports on a study on the use of dietary supplements concluding that not all supplements are good for you.

Researchers used data from the Iowa Women’s Health Study which followed a group of women with a mean age of 61.6 for a period of 20 years starting 1986.  They concluded:

In older women, several commonly used dietary vitamin and mineral supplements may be associated with increased total mortality risk; this association is strongest with supplemental iron. In contrast to the findings of many studies, calcium is associated with decreased risk.

The supplements they referred to included multivitamins , vitamin B_{6 ,} folic acid , iron, magnesium, zinc  and copper. 

It goes without saying that it is better to get your vitamins and minerals from food.  Supplements are just that – supplements to your food intake. 

However there are clear cases for the use of supplemental Vitamin D, Omega 3 and so on for menopausal women, therefore alarmists headlines like these need to be tempered by specific details.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 8:49 am and is filed under News, Supplements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.