Wednesday, March 05, 2014

USPSTF says we shouldn't study supplements as if they were drugs

Steve: One aspect of the US Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) recent announcement that there is not enough evidence to support dietary supplements for preventing heart disease and cancer did not make headlines. They admitted that conventional medicine isn’t qualified to properly assess the benefits of dietary supplements. This is to my knowledge the first major medical organization to publicly admit this.

Alliance for Natural Health does a great job supporting the USPSTF statement in this piece.

My most important takeaway?

"Research should target those who are deficient in the nutrient they are testing instead of patients with optimal nutrient levels (a point that should be self-evident but has always been ignored). Integrative doctors have used the hundreds of thousands of these studies on dietary supplements to devise successful healing protocols, but they usually begin with tests to determine deficiencies and they do not generally use a one-pill-or-dose-per-health-problem approach."

The majority of studies I cite on a weekly basis are those that address deficiency and the results after the deficiencies are corrected.

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