Will vitamins cure you or kill you?

Another must read report from Sandy of the Junkfood Science blog.

Interesting that the "bad" information about vitamins cuts both ways and this says a lot about how the media always has a tendency to hype and distort issues.

I was almost going to write "complex issues", but in this case there isn't much complexity.

For healthy people with reasonable diets there is absolutely no evidence at all that vitamin supplaments have any health benefit. Zero. None. Yader.

And a well conducted meta-analysis of a large number of studies conclusively shows this.

But unfortunately this got picked up in the media, (admittedly with some help from the authors of the study), and transmuted into “Vitamins may shorten your life!”

As Sandy shows, the study's data in no way supports such a conclusion. Other than for Vitamin A, people's self-dosing with vitamins may be a pointless waste of money, but it is not doing them any harm.