Did you see Inside New Zealand: Are Vitamins Killing You?

Wow what a show. I was really keen to watch this and even recorded it to look over later. Good thing I did too, as I thought it was a bit controversial and miss leading. Well for the most part anyway.

We (my wife and I) have been taking supplements for quite some time now and have both noticed quite a benefit from doing so. This was the start of me questioning, what’s going on with other people or, what’s different with what I’m taking.

You can view the video here.

So let’s start from the beginning. First off they picked eight people that were taking vitamins. One of those picked was taking bee pollen and not what most of us would call a vitamin but supplement all the same. The others were all taking different supplement including vitamins.

Once all had been picked they gave them a blood test and checked the levels of vitamins in their blood. After they had all had their supplements taken off them they stopped taking them with the exception of the one person taking bee pollen. She started taking a multi vitamin that was given by them.

After 6 weeks of not taking supplements (and the one taking multi vitamins) they were given another blood test to check the levels in their blood again.

So what’s the problem with that?

There are a number of issues that I see with this. One being that this was not a true control group. As they stated in the documentary, all people ate healthy and looked after themselves better than the average person. This means that we have no blood test of an average person and the effect of multi vitamins added to their diet. This I think would have been a very interesting comparison and could have shed light on what difference an average person would have by adding supplements.

This brings me to the blood tests. Now I must admit that I’m no scientist and anyone that knows me will definitely agree. But even so I know that there is way more to health, blood, and supplements. A couple of thing that I would have like to have seen in these tests are, red blood cell count, white blood cell count, platelets, and cholesterol. Also a blood pressure test would not have gone a miss.

The last thing was that they said that the supplements they were taking were synthetic (not natural or classed as food) and that they were medicine\drugs. They also said that vitamins from food is fine but from pills is not (There is a bit more to this and can be seen in the video). Now, there is good news and bad news about this. First the bad news, they are mostly correct with everything. The good news is that you can get natural food vitamins from a pill (non synthetic), and like they said food vitamins are good for you. For more information on natural vitamins please contact me and I will send you some details.