How TheWeek.com got swindled into pushing Big Pharma's anti-nutrition propaganda

Sunday, December 22, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: Big Pharma, TheWeek.com, anti-nutrition propaganda

(NaturalNews) A recent hack-job "study" declaring all multivitamins to be completely useless has been exposed as nothing more than drug industry propaganda following the revelation that not only were the vitamins used in the study synthetic, but the study itself was backed and funded by Big Pharma. And one of the vocal proponents of this so-called study, TheWeek.com, obviously fell hard for the swindle, failing to identify the role that vaccine quack and drug profiteer Paul Offit played in spearheading the media blitz of this latest edition of pure junk science.

In case you missed it, the Big Pharma rag journal Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study review claiming that all vitamins are a complete waste of money and that people should avoid taking them in order to stay healthy. Though the study was technically just an opinion piece written by questionable and obviously misinformed researchers from some of the top drug-pushing institutions in the country, the mainstream media ran with the story and began publishing insane headlines about the alleged "dangers" of taking multivitamins.

To anyone with half a brain, the whole hysterical stunt was obviously contrived by the drug industry to malign the vitamin and mineral supplement industry, and thus boost drug sales. But to everyone else, including senior editor Peter Weber from TheWeek.com, the scam is being regarded as the new gospel of modern medicine, even though key aspects of the study's methodology, such as what types of vitamins and minerals were used, are not being analyzed and discussed.

"Unfortunately, the vitamin formulation greatly determines effectiveness," wrote one conscientious commenter over at TheWeek.com. "Studies disproving the benefits of vitamin supplementation often use vitamin forms that have very poor bioavailability. So, before we jump to conclusions that supplementation is effective or not, we need to design a study that at least uses what biochemists trained in this see as the best supplement types and forms on the market are."

Drug companies funded this latest 'study' demonizing their biggest competitor

Then there is the aspect of who is funding such tripe, which in this case includes drug companies with a vested interest in seeing vitamins and minerals fail. A quick visit to the Annals of Internal Medicine website, for instance, generates multiple advertising banners promoting the latest heart attack drugs and cholesterol medicines. Is this a source that can be trusted to provide truthful information about nutrition?

"I am concerned that the general public will generalize this news release... as applying to all vitamins, when the research, most likely, only applies to one MULTIvitamin," wrote another commenter at TheWeek.com. "The only MULTIvitamin mentioned was Centrum Silver, the most highly advertised and consequently the largest selling multivitamin... [which] is known to be compacted so tightly that it passes like a bullet through the digestive system."

And what about vaccine hawk Paul Offit, who once stated before the media that vaccines are so safe that children can safely be injected with 10,000 of them at once? Offit's undeniable ties to the drug industry fully explain why he was quick to endorse the study's "findings," dragging the late Linus Pauling into a hateful diatribe against vitamins that he wrote for The Guardian. Offit's orgasmic approval of this new study only further proves how flawed it truly is.

"I could conduct a study where people tried to put out a forest fire with squirt guns, and when it failed, I could say that it proves that you can't put out a forest fire with water," wrote yet another disapproving TheWeek.com commenter, using the beauty of metaphor to illustrate what many in the mainstream media carelessly overlooked concerning this latest hit piece against vitamins and minerals.

Sources for this article include:

http://theweek.com

http://www.cspinet.org

http://www.doctorsresearch.com

http://science.naturalnews.com