Why vitamin pills are useless and even harmful

Once Linus Polling came up with a brilliant idea, he thought. Just one change in the usual breakfast was supposed to prolong the activity of the scientist. He was already 65, but he was going to work, as before. Polling stopped at the idea of adding vitamin C to his orange juice. It looked as if we had decided to add more sugar to Coca-Cola. But our hero was convinced of his rightness.

How the idea of one person can take hold of the masses

In the scientific community Polling had an indisputable authority as a two-time winner of the Nobel Prize (including in chemistry). So with the supply of one person vitamins began their victorious procession around the world. Than, by the way, a lot was pleased with the already not poor pharmacological industry. There was a direct correlation: the more popular the scientist became, the more mass sales of vitamins and biologically active additives became. But here's the paradox: none of the scientific world at that time dared to commit themselves to verify the correctness of Polling's idea. As it turned out later, the concept of supplementary use of vitamins was erroneous

Focus on antioxidant properties

According to Polling, supplements filled with antioxidants are able to neutralize free radicals or, as they are called in the scientific world, highly reactive molecules. Antioxidant properties, according to the scientist, had vitamin C, folic acid, beta-carotene and vitamin E. The danger of exposure to free radicals on the human body was first discovered by a fellow Rochester Institute Rebecca Gershman in 1954. In subsequent years, Denam Harman, associate professor of the Department of Medical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley, seized the idea. In two years it was revealed that free radicals entail deterioration of the body cells. In fact, the main causes of aging of the body and the appearance of most diseases were identified. It is now actively discussing the benefits and harm of vitamins. And then, in the middle of the 20th century, it was clear to everyone that dietary supplements charge a person with health.

The main enemies of the body

Already in the early 1970s, medicine openly declared the connection of free radicals with the aging of the body. Here is what Dr. Harman wrote in 1982: "If we work to reduce the level of free radicals in the human body, this will lead to a decrease in the rate of biological aging of the body. In our hands is the key to longevity. I hope that this theory can find ways that will significantly improve the quality of our lives. "

The theory was fiasco

However, in practice, all the experiments that were carried out in this direction over the next decades have failed completely. No desired results have been achieved. Experiments on both normal and genetically modified rats, in whose blood antioxidants were administered, produced the same result. Rodents could not resist either the destructive effect of body aging in general, or diseases in particular.

Based on long-term clinical trials

And only after it became clear that the idea of a rate on taking antioxidants does not work on rodents, scientists began to conduct long-term clinical trials in humans. The principle of research had a general scheme: volunteers were determined on the basis of the same age category, lifestyle and social prosperity. Then the selected candidates were divided into two conditional groups, one of which took a certain additive for a long time, and the other did not. Thus, on the principle of a double-blind method, researchers repeatedly revealed a slightly encouraging picture.

A Finnish study conducted among 29,000 smoking participants aged around 50 years found the following: vitamin A, taken on a long-term basis, can increase the risk of lung cancer by 16 percent. American women at the age of postmenopausal women had a 20 percent chance of developing breast cancer due to the daily intake of vitamin B9 (folic acid.) Other, more extensive studies showed even more depressing results. In one experiment, more than 80 people left the camp for four years to take their supplements, at the same time, participants from the placebo group remained fully alive at the end of the study. Thus, the scientific community was forced to admit that the idea of additional intake of antioxidants is completely mistaken.