In the article Iowa Women’s Health Study, much of the piece takes many things that are widely known as beneficial within a large number of vitamin supplements, and links some of these to various deaths in which people with diseases would essentially overdose themselves on vitamins in a desperate grab to fight off the disease. The article then discounts the fact that many people do not even use vitamins except for when they are sick, wrongfully linking an absurd amount of deaths directly to the use of vitamins and other supplements. As an example, a person was diagnosed with a life threatening disease, and in a sense of sheer panic began using as much as 40 supplements all at once, going up from using literally nothing the previous day. This example was then taken out of context and used as a source of evidence that supplements are in fact potentially deadly – a completely biased and ridiculous claim!
There are many discrepancies within the article itself: Many of the studied patients also used unnatural amounts of hormones found in doctor recommended supplements, as well as supplements found to have a copious amount of iron and copper in them. The study also discredited other known beneficial substances such as omega-3 fatty acids, and would instead take an absurd amount of vitamin C over just about everything else as a basis of information. This kind of bias and misinformation is what leads the public to believe in mostly anything that major ‘scientific’ studies continue to propagate.