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Vitamin D And Fish Oil Supplements Disappoint In Long-Awaited Study Results
Many people routinely take nutritional supplements such as vitamin D and fish oil in the hopes of staving off major killers like cancer and heart disease.
But the evidence about the possible benefits of the supplements has been mixed.
Now, long-awaited government-funded research has produced some of the clearest evidence yet about the usefulness of taking the supplements. And the results — published in two papers — are disappointing.
"Both trials were negative," says Dr. Lawrence Fine, chief of the clinical application and prevention branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the studies.
"Overall, they showed that neither fish oil nor vitamin D actually lowered the incidence of heart disease or cancer," Fine says.
The results were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago and released online Saturday by the New England Journal of Medicine. One paper focused on vitamin D supplementation and the other focused on fish oil.
The trials involved nearly 26,000 healthy adults age 50 and older with no history of cancer or heart disease who took part in the VITAL research project. Twenty percent of the participants were African-American.
Some of the participants took either 1 gram of fish oil — which contains omega-3 fatty acids — plus 2,000 international units of vitamin D daily. Others consumed the same dose of vitamin D plus a placebo, while others ingested the same dose of fish oil plus a placebo. The last group took two placebos. After more than five years, researchers were unable to find any overall benefit.
While the overall results were disappointing, there appeared to be a beneficial effect when it came to one aspect of heart disease and fish oil: heart attacks.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
For health, you've got to consistently eat a healthy diet.
You can't "fix it" with supplements because other factors in the healthy food act together with the "known active ingredient". Eating fish is better than a fish oil pill.
Real food beats prepared convenience food. And eat your salad. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13 2018, @04:47PM
This may or may not be true, but this is, of course, pure speculation. It just sounds "right" and jibes with that Puritan work ethic of "there are no shortcuts".