Members in the Media
From: Yahoo! Health

Should You Quit Taking Vitamins?

Yahoo! Health:

I’m a big fan of vitamins. And judging by the size of the vitamin and supplement industry—$20 billion in annual sales, a quarter of that in multivitamins—so are you. Pop one pill and you get a day’s worth of nutrients. What’s not to love?

Well, there is this: A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking multivitamins and other supplements may actually shorten your life. Uh-oh.

Researchers in the study collected information from nearly 40,000 women (but say the findings apply to men too) several times over 22 years. They asked about all sorts of health issues, including vitamin and supplement use. After reconciling this data with health and death records, researchers identified seven supplements that actually seem to hasten death: vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper, and your innocent-looking multivitamin. The increase in mortality rate ranged from 2.2 percent (multivitamins) to a whopping 18 percent (copper).

Read the whole story: Yahoo! Health

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