LiveLongAgeWell

At the end of this post I’ll tell you how you can be considered to enter the study…

If you follow LLAW, you might know that my “favorite supplements” are, currently, fish oil tablets and vitamin D. In various posts I have detailed all sorts of possible benefits from these two supplements, and note that you can get both through natural sources (such as small doses of sunshine, or salmon) as well as from pills (and generally, natural sources are the better option).

The problem is that various other supplements have been heralded in the past as being wonderful and great for a variety of problems, especially for cutting the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. But then when really well-designed research studies are done, the supplements often fail to show a good effect, and sometimes they even result in more harm than good.

Vitamin E, folic acid, selenium, and beta-carotene all fall into this category, like Michael Jackson, of “fallen super-stars”, and, who knows, in five years we might be saying the same thing about vitamin D or fish oil (though I doubt it). The type of study that needs to be done—to see if vitamin D and fish oil are really any good—is a double-blind, randomized, prospective clinical trial. This sort of study is not commonly done as it’s expensive and it takes years to see the results.

Such a study starts with a large group of people, preferably many thousands, and splits them up into equal groups, that is, groups that are equally healthy or unhealthy, and then the researchers give some of them an active pill, for example, vitamin D, and the other group a fake pill, a placebo, and then a few years later compare the two groups to see how they did. Best if neither the people taking the drug nor the researchers know who is taking what (“double-blind”), and only break the “code” at the end of the experiment.

But most studies on vitamins and supplements are not like this; instead, they are “retrospective”…the researchers look at the health of different groups of people and look backwards in time (retrospectively) and see what they were taking or doing or eating, and try to deduce if a particular behavior or vitamin or whatever was responsible for the good or bad effect. But this research method leaves a lot to be desired, and it’s one reason you read a study that comes out stating that such-and-such is great, then a year later, you read the opposite. The problem could well be that either study, or both, was poorly-designed, and unless you really dig into an article to see if the study was prospective, double-blind, etc, you don’t know which research to better believe.

So starting early next year Harvard University is going to be doing one of the prospective clinical trials with vitamin D and fish oil (they are calling this the VITAL study). The research will study the subjects for five years into the future (prospective) and see how they all do. In 2016, then, we should know if fish oil and/or vitamin D are good for decreasing the risk of stroke, heart disease, or cancer—the three diseases the research is studying. Now even this is not going to be a perfect study, as it relies on people self-reporting their health via questionnaire (at times inaccurate), and while the researchers try to disguise the placebo pills, some people will try to figure out what they’re taking, try to outguess the researchers, and/or will take extra vitamin D or fish oil or other agents on the side, or not take the pills as they promised to if they think they are placebo.

But still, this study is probably the best we’ll get, and is better than any retrospective study. Here’s your chance to be a part of it… Harvard is now recruiting potential “subjects”. If you are interested in participating, or just want to read more details about this study, click here.