Media hoax exposed: Recent attack on vitamins a fabricated scare campaign

Sunday, October 16, 2011 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: vitamins, mortality risk, health news

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(NaturalNews) TIME, USA Today, MSNBC, NPR, CTV, the LA Times and numerous other mainstream media outlets have all been running a juvenile hoax over the last week. Through various misleading headlines, they're all claiming that vitamins might kill you. Here are some of the headlines:

Study links vitamins to higher death rates in women - CTV

Study: Vitamins may increase death risk in older women - USA Today

We've Been Wasting a Ton of Money on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements - TIME

Some common vitamin supplements could increase death risk - MSNBC

Dietary supplements risky for older women, study finds - LA Times

Supplements Look Risky In Study Of Older Women - NPR

Vitamins do more harm than good, new suggest says - News.com.au

Women Who Take Vitamin Supplements May Have Increased Death Risk - Huffington Post

There are literally hundreds of headlines from mainstream news sources that essentially say the same thing.

There's only one problem with all this: The whole thing is a HOAX! And NaturalNews is stepping forward to expose this hoax using data from the published study itself.

Exposed: A total mainstream media hoax

Caught yet again, the mainstream media has been exposed pulling off a juvenile, simplistic hoax that attempts to scare people away from good nutrition. To accomplish this hoax, they took a poorly-constructed "scientific" study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine which was itself based on erroneous conclusions (see below) and then blatantly misreported what the study data actually showed.

This journal is owned, not surprisingly, by the American Medical Association, which has a long and sordid history of openly attacking vitamins and nutrition, even to the point of committing crimes that violate federal law. Remember, the AMA has been found guilty of conspiracy in federal courts: https://www.naturalnews.com/008845.html

All this is yet another case of quack journalism on the part of the mainstream media, which is largely funded by pharmaceutical interests, of course. They never miss an opportunity to try to attack vitamins and dietary supplements, even if it means revealing they are total Big Pharma "presstitutes" who pretend to be real journalists.

But don't take my word for it: Let's do something the mainstream media presstitutes never do and actually look at the study data for a change!

What the study actually reveals

The study is entitled "Dietary Supplements and Mortality Rate in Older Women" - Arch Intern Med. 2011;171(18):1625-1633

The study claims to have reviewed the vitamin and mineral supplement use in 38,772 older women by mailing them 3 surveys over 18 years, asking them to recall what vitamins and minerals they were taking.

So hold the presses. This is a "survey study" -- or what's commonly called an "observational study" -- which are notoriously inaccurate to begin with. As Dr. David Brownstein told me in a groundbreaking InfoWars Nightly News interview, "This study says absolutely nothing about vitamins," Dr. Brownstein said. "If this study was done in reverse, where vitamins were shown to be effective, no journal would have printed this study because it was so poorly done."

Watch the interview yourself at:
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=ED23BF976CEED6...

(The part with Dr. Brownstein begins at roughly 6:00.)

Study data were ALTERED!

One of the most glaring total fabrications in this particular study is the alteration of the raw data using statistical voodoo. If you go to table 2 of the study (page 4 of the study PDF, which we can't post here because it's not a public document), it shows a "Hazard Ratio" number associated with each of the nutrients covered in the study, such as vitamin D, vitamin D, calcium, copper, iron, and so on. There's also a number associated with "multivitamin."

With these numbers, a 1.0 means "neutral" or "no increase in mortality." A number below 1.0 -- such as 0.92 -- means a reduction in mortality. For example, 0.92 would mean an 8% reduction in mortality associated with that particular vitamin.

A number higher than 1.0 means an "increase" in mortality. So something like 1.15 would mean a 15% increase in total mortality.

So what do these numbers really say?

• Vitamin B complex was associated with a 7% reduction in mortality

• Vitamin C was associated with a 4% reduction in mortality

• Vitamin D was associated with an 8% reduction in mortality

• Magnesium was associated with a 3% reduction in mortality

• Selenium was associated with a 3% reduction in mortality

• Zinc was associated with a 3% reduction in mortality

I bet you didn't read that in the mainstream media, huh? That's because they never reported these numbers! Once again, they just cherry picked whatever scary data they wanted to show you while ignoring the rest.

On the negative side of the findings:

• Folic acid was associated with a 9% increase in mortality

• Copper was associated with a 31% increase in mortality

"Multivitamins," which the mainstream media viciously attacked with their lying whore headlines, were associated with -- guess what? -- only a two percent increase in mortality.

Voodoo statistics used to alter the outcome

But wait! In this study, they didn't use the actual survey results as their concluding data. Nope, they began to massage the data using a voodoo formula that they came up with after the fact in an effort to make the data "fit the curve" they wanted.

By their own admission, they first adjusted all the numbers for "age, educational level, place of residence, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared), waist to hip ratio, hormone replacement therapy, physical activity, smoking status, and intake of energy."

But hold on a second: They're saying that a person with diabetes has a higher risk of death, so if that person died, they wouldn't "count it" as much as a healthy person dying, right? But they utterly failed to take into account the fact that nutrients can reverse diabetes and make diabetes symptoms completely disappear. Those would be nutrients like vitamin D, magnesium and vitamin C, all of which were covered in the study. So if a woman in the study started out as diabetic, and then she took nutrients that helped her reverse diabetes, and then she later died as a non-diabetic but still earlier than a person who had been healthy her whole life, then this would count as a more strongly weighted "penalty" against vitamins in the data!

The same is true with high blood pressure. You see, the statistical voodoo that took place in this study was based on the completely false belief by western research quacks that vitamins do not prevent, cure or reverse disease. So they failed to account for that action in their own data.

Thus, just on that point alone, this study is a complete, juvenile joke! It wouldn't even earn a "C" on a high school science project, and yet it seems like it was good enough for the Archives of Internal Medicine, which receives millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies.

But wait... there's more!

The data were altered a second time!

Not content to massage the data just once, these study authors went even further and actually changed all the results a second time! This was done through yet another "multivariable adjustment" in which the authors:

"...adjusted for age; educational level; place of residence; diabetes mellitus; high blood pressure; body mass index; waist to hip ratio; hormone replacement therapy; physical activity; smoking status; and intake of energy, alcohol, saturated fatty acids, whole grain products, fruits, and vegetables."

Okay, wow, so they adjusted for intake of fruits and vegetables, too? This means a person who ate more fruits and vegetables was assumed to be more healthy, and therefore whatever age they died at was weighed toward (blamed on) other factors such as the vitamins they were taking!

The fact is, the weight factors in all these voodoo adjustments were totally made up by the study authors. I have no doubt they sat there with a large Excel spreadsheet and just ran thousands of different combinations of assumptions and weights -- fudging their data -- until they managed to produce the results they wanted.

And what results were that? Oh my goodness, can you believe it? Vitamins might kill you!

Yep, by massaging the data, factoring in their own made-up assumptions, fudging the weights and ignoring correlations between nutrition and disease prevention, these researchers managed to eliminate all the reduction of mortality risk that was demonstrated by nutrients like vitamin D, while simultaneously making nutrients like copper look like they were the next worst thing to poison (a 45% increased risk in mortality).

All this really amounts to little more than mental masturbation by a circle jerk of scientists who set out to "prove" vitamins were bad from the get-go. They actually had to alter the data TWICE to get the results they wanted.

And then, just to throw some icing on the cake, they wrap all this scientific fraud in their language of statistical significance, "multivariable adjusted models" and other technical jargon that they hope will sufficiently shroud the reality that this study is complete scientific fraud.

If Dr. Andrew Wakefield had used this massaging of the data to show that vaccines caused autism, he would have been laughed off the stage, stripped of his medical license, persecuted by the media and declared a quack by the rest of the medical community. But of course, when a bunch of doctors writing for the AMA use this obvious scientific fraud to conclude that "vitamins might kill you," suddenly it's perfectly okay with the entire scientific community, the whore media, the corrupt medical journals and of course all the idiotic doctors who still ridiculously believe that supplemental nutrition has no role to play in human health.

Massive conflicts of interest - but they're never disclosed or reported

As Dr. Brownstein explained earlier, if this study had shown vitamins to be effective at reducing mortality, doctors and critics would have bashed it as being total "quack science." But because they could use the study to try to discredit vitamins, mainstream media presstitutes have decided it's good enough to quote in their newspapers, magazines and news programs.

The second huge point in all this that nobody bothered to mention is that the Archives of Internal Medicine is funded by drug company advertising, creating an immediate and obvious conflict of interest which was never disclosed in the publication of the study. Gee, do ya think a drug company rag that makes its money from pharmaceutical advertisements might have a financial incentive to destroy the reputation of the vitamins that often compete with pharmaceuticals? Really? Ya think so?

TIME didn't bother to mention this to their readers. Neither did USA Today, or MSNBC, or anyone in the mainstream who reported on this. Of course, if a study touting the benefits of vitamins had appeared in a journal funded by vitamin companies, they would have attacked the whole thing as an outrageous conflict of interest! (You gotta love the selective logic of these presstitutes who only cherry pick the selected tidbits they want you to read...)

No differentiation between synthetic versus natural vitamins

Further discrediting the conclusions of this study, it did not differentiate between synthetic vitamins and natural vitamins. So for all we know, these older women in the study could be taking bottom-of-the-barrel vitamins found at common retailers like Wal-Mart and grocery stores. These are cheap multivitamin brands made with synthetic chemicals that claim to be vitamins but really aren't. Most of those vitamins are made by pharmaceutical companies! And I would have to agree that taking synthetic vitamin E is very, very bad for your health, just like taking synthetic medications is bad, too.

By avoiding any distinction between synthetic versus natural vitamins, the study authors knew that any negative results would immediately be used to discredit ALL vitamins. This, of course, was done by design. Virtually all the conventional medical studies that look at vitamins use this same tactic, refusing to make any distinction between natural nutrition versus synthetic vitamins, which are really just DRUGS given vitamin "names."

In other words, if you believe this study found something negative about vitamins, the reality of the situation is that most of these women were probably taking drugs given the names of vitamins and then packaged into "one-a-day" multivitamin formats that, are toxic to the human body in the first place.

You see, in western quack science, there is no distinction between a nutrient created in the lab versus a nutrient that comes from nature. But in nature, nutrients are different! Vitamin C, for example, doesn't exist in isolation in nature; it's always found with other supporting antioxidants and phytonutrients. So taking vitamin C from a plant-based source (camu camu, for example) is qualitatively different from taking vitamin C created in a lab (ascorbic acid). Today's conventional quack scientists and doctors are too ignorant about nutrition to know the difference (that's a fact), so they make no distinction in their research studies, either.

Heck, today's quack medical researchers and doctors don't even recognize any difference between living foods and dead foods! To them, it's all the same: A dead food has the same minerals and calories and vitamins as a living food, they claim. They're dead wrong about that, of course -- which is why so many doctors are just plain DEAD in the first place -- as living foods have a quality that goes beyond the detection of their crude laboratory tests.

This story continues in part two, available at this link:
https://www.naturalnews.com/033893_mainstream...

Also check out this rebuttal against the vitamin scare hoax as published by the Life Extension Foundation:

http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/1014_Fl...