COULD YOUR VITAMINS BE MORE DEADLY THAN RAT POISON?
By: Dr. Blaise Ryan
“POISON! DANGER! MAY BE FATAL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED. CAUSES SEVERE IRRITATION TO SKIN AND EYES. CAUSES IRRITATION TO RESPIRATORY TRACT. AFFECTS LIVER, KIDNEYS, BLOOD, SPLEEN.”
What do you think this warning is referring to? Rat poison? Chemical cleaning agent? Pesticide?
Think again! This is the Material Safety Data Sheet description of the hazards of sodium selenite. Which is the common and inexpensive USP form of selenium used in many vitamin supplements.
Sure there are those who will say that the ‘devil is in the dosage’. And it would be easy to argue that a small amount of USP grade selenium is good for you, as it represents a mineral that is recommended for many reasons. But consider this:
In April of 2001, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center reported that supplementations of selenium at high dosages resulted in DNA damage. This is the exact opposite effect for why you would be inclined to take selenium supplements in the first place.
And if you thought those reports were shocking, listen to this…
If you thought that taking a daily dosage of Vitamin C is good for you - You may be terribly mistaken...
Synthetic Vitamin C is called Ascorbic Acid. And it is more refined than white table sugar. As a matter of fact it is produced out of glucose. Starting with refined glucose, 6 more levels of refinement are gone through to create what is called ascorbic acid. And this is what the ‘natural products’ industry calls Vitamin C.
A study presented in 2000 at the American Heart Association said that taking “just” 500 mg of ascorbic acid appeared to be hastening the onset of hardening of the arteries. More recently the University of Pennsylvania indicated that even 200 mg of ascorbic acid could trigger DNA oxidative damage.
And now let’s briefly stroll down the frightening research involving calcium supplements:
Dr. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist at Cornell University, devoted a lifetime of study to the link between calcium consumption and bone fracture. In Discover Magazine of 2000 an article on his work concluded that the more calcium people consumed, the more susceptible they became to getting hip fractures.
Furthermore, the Harvard Nurses’ Health study involved 78,000 nurses over a 12-year study. The Harvard researchers noted:
“Nurses who drank the most milk – two or more glasses a day – broke more bones than the others.”
Disturbing evidence of the harmful health effects of excessive calcium supplementation has been linked to:
- · Cardiovascular problems
- · Arthritis
- · Kidney Stones
- · Prostate Cancer
- · Osteoporosis
So what does all this mean? Does it mean the supplementation is a total crock and does more harm than good?
Not exactly. All these studies around the negative effects of vitamins involve USP forms of vitamins and minerals. USP refers to the United States Pharmacopoeia. Simply put, it is a synthetic form of the vitamin. Simply put, when science finds a positive vitamin in a fruit, what they do is isolate the molecular form of the vitamin. Then through chemical refinement the molecular is reproduced. And mass industrial production of this molecule follows in order to supply the USP vitamin to the hundreds of vitamin companies around the world.
The interesting thing is that there are very few industrial sources for synthetic vitamins. And the vast majority of the supplementation companies buy their USP compounds from the same sources. They just mix and blend them differently with varying other compounds and elements to create their own brand. But in essence it’s all just USP grade synthetic vitamins.
Am I saying that synthetic vitamins are bad? No! Perhaps in the decades to follow research will show that ingesting large amounts of synthetic chemicals are actually good for us. Right now there is a lot of research showing us that we must use USP supplements carefully and under proper health supervision.
But what I do know is that there is a way to totally circumvent the potential risk in taking USP grade supplements. That’s to get your vitamins from natural sources. There are two that I know of:
1. Natural foods. Obviously organic foods have the highest amounts of vitamins and minerals. The only problem is that our bodies require more vitamins than ever before because of our high stress lives. So we must rely on:
2. Non-synthetic supplements. There are a very small number of companies that I know of that use non-synthetic vitamins. The brand that I recommend and that we carry at our clinic is New Chapters.
Not only are New Chapters vitamins certified organic. But they undergo a unique fermentation process, so that they are imbued with a healthy and natural amount of probiotics. This not only increases the absorbability of the supplements but it also helps improve the overall health of your digestive system.
On top of that New Chapters includes super-critically extracted botanicals that are grown on their own biodynamic farm in Costa Rica and brimming with protective antioxidants.
If you would like to receive a complimentary supplementation diagnosis with one of our doctors of natural medicine call our clinic at 613-216-2135. We can diagnose your needs and give you a personalized non-synthetic supplementation program.
Toxic Overload
"Toxic load consists of past and present physical, chemical, biological contaminants in food, air and water, as well as the emotional state of the individual. You can compare total body burden to a container - you can only fill it to capacity. Anything above capacity causes spillover or, in other words, allergic symptoms and ultimately sickness. Another image to keep in mind is the straw that breaks the camel's back". Jozef J. Krop, M.D., FAAEM, Healing the Planet, One Patient at a Time.
Recent studies show acupuncture is helpful in treating headaches
By DRS. REMY COEYTAUX and WUNIAN CHEN
UNC Health Care
Headache is a common symptom that affects most adults at some point in their lives. There are many different causes of headache, but the two most common headache diagnoses are migraine and tension-type headaches.
Another type of headache that appears to be becoming increasingly more common is chronic daily headache (CDH). CDH is currently defined as the occurrence of headache 15 or more days per month, largely irrespective of the cause of the headaches.
There are several medications that have been proven to be highly effective in treating migraine headaches, and there are some medications that can be useful in the treatment of tension-type headaches. Most of the medications commonly used for headache, however, have the potential to cause the “transformation” of episodic migraines to CDH. This paradoxical relationship between medications and CDH (in that the very medications used to treat some headaches are implicated in the development of difficult-to-treat CDH) has led many headache experts and headache sufferers to explore non-pharmacological ways of treating or preventing headaches.
The most effective way to prevent many types of headaches, including migraines, is to avoid headache triggers such as sleep deprivation, certain foods, changes in daily routine, allergens, or other activities, exposures or substances that seem to trigger a person’s headaches. When such avoidance of triggers is not possible or not sufficiently effective, the next best non-pharmacological option may be acupuncture.
Acupuncture is a healing technique that has been used in China and other eastern Asian cultures for more than 3,000 years. It involves placing fine, metal needles in specific bodily locations and leaving them in place for periods of a few seconds to one or more hours at a time. This therapeutic technique has been used to treat headache for thousands of years, but only recently has its efficacy in the treatment of headache been studied rigorously.
The results of at least four relatively large and well-designed, randomized, clinical trials were published in medical journals in 2004 and 2005. One study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), demonstrated that patients in the United Kingdom who experienced frequent headaches and who were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture treatments over a period of three months reported fewer days with headache than the patients who did not receive acupuncture.
Another study, conducted at the University of North Carolina and published in the journal Headache, demonstrated that patients with CDH who were randomized to acupuncture reported significant improvements in quality of life and improvements in their headache conditions compared to patients who did not receive acupuncture.
Two studies conducted in Germany and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and BMJ demonstrated that acupuncture was effective in the treatment of both migraine and tension-type headache when compared to no acupuncture, but not when compared to sham acupuncture (the shallow insertion of acupuncture needles in bodily locations not generally believed to be helpful in the treatment of headache). The lack of a statistically significant difference between “true” and “sham” acupuncture suggests either that the benefits associated with acupuncture are due to a placebo effect or that sham acupuncture confers some “real” clinical benefit, or a combination of the two.
These studies support the conclusion that acupuncture appears to be a safe and effective way of treating headaches without the use of medications, or along with medical therapy. Although it is not yet clear how much of acupuncture’s benefits can be explained by the “placebo effect,” there is very good evidence to suggest that many people who experience frequent or severe headaches may benefit from a series of acupuncture treatments.
Remy Coeytaux, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor and Wunian Chen, MD, LAc, is an instructor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
This column was released for publication in January 2006. www.boomingpractice.com