The Human Body Is A Marvelous Thing
posted by gyma
I don't trust the medical community all that much unless I have a broken bone or some such thing. Every day I see something claiming this is good for you or that is bad for you and it's now at the point where I don't know what to believe.
Take calcium supplements, for example. For years and years women have been urged to take calcium supplements to stave off osteoporosis. Sounds reasonable enough. The thing is, taking additional calcium *might* keep you from developing osteoporosis, but it might also just kill you from a heart attack!
What researchers found should make supplement-poppers take notice: those who had the highest intake of supplementary calcium — 1400 mg a day or above — had double the risk of dying from any cause and a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those whose intake was a more moderate 600-1000 mg a day.
It's not completely clear what the relationship is between calcium supplements and heart disease, says Dr. Orli Etingin, professor of clinical medicine and director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
"We have no idea what it is about calcium that's bad for the heart," she says. "The plaque found in coronary arteries is calcified, so one might guess it has something to do with the calcification of plaque. But much of that relationship remains to be determined, if in fact it holds true."
For your own health, you really need to start reading labels and keeping a food diary. I use Fit Day and it seems to work well enough for me. I'm sure there are many others out there. One of the problems with supplements is people don't know how much calcium they are consuming in their food, so they don't know exactly how much of a supplement they need.
They call it *supplement* for a reason!
It's really less of a medical community thing and more of a news media thing: reporting on health issues is almost always dreadful.
As best as I can tell, there's an emerging consensus that for the average person with a reasonably decent diet supplements are unnecessary and a waste of money (to emphasize: for the average person; obviously, if someone has some sort of condition that may be another matter).
But science could declare me wrong tomorrow!
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Posted by: spork_incident | 16 February 2013 at 17:43
Also: thanks to Orrin Hatch, supplements are almost entirely unregulated.
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Posted by: spork_incident | 16 February 2013 at 17:45
True, the media is often at fault although most of the time they are simply reporting on a study published in some highly respected medical journal. I've had doctors belittle me for not taking calcium supplements, but we never have a discussion before that about diet, need, etc.
In general, I no longer think doctors are as brilliant as they think they are. And they seem incapable of admitting when they don't know what they don't know.
Posted by: gyma | 17 February 2013 at 12:13
although most of the time they are simply reporting on a study published in some highly respected medical journal.
True. But the failure of the media is in not putting the report into context; of often not saying, Other studies, however...
I no longer think doctors are as brilliant as they think they are.
Oh they never were (The God Complex and all that). But more often than not anymore doctors are working in a system that demands profits above all else, even to the point of having to meet quotas.
Actually, the failure of both the media and of medicine is due to the demand that profits be made.
I'm sensing a pattern here.
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Posted by: spork_incident | 17 February 2013 at 17:37