Vitamin C and the media

The Bangor Daily News recently printed a story obtained from a national wire service, reporting high-dose vitamin C in a test-tube causes DNA damage. The story came from an article published in Science magazine. It has long been known that test-tube studies do not correlate with tests conducted in living systems. The dual role of vitamin C as both a pro-oxidant (rusting agent) and anti-oxidant (cell preservative) has been published in scientific journals for some time now. A quick search on Medline revealed that high-dose vitamin C does not cause any toxic byproducts in human studies. The toxic effect is only observed in test tubes.

The lead university researcher of this study was Ian Blair of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Cancer Pharmacology. The University of Pennsylvania is the originator of Oncolink, an online source of cancer information. Interestingly, Oncolink’s sponsors are the drug companies AstraZeneca, Amgen, Ortho Biotech, Pharmacia, Pfizer and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Are the drug companies using a major university as their agent for spreading misinformation about vitamins?

It is becoming more obvious that misinformation about vitamins, minerals and herbal products are being planted in the news media and published in medical journals in a calculated fashion. The reason is that more and more Americans are taking health care into their own hands and relying less and less upon doctors and drugs. Most folks are unaware that the biological action of many drugs can be duplicated with nutritional supplements at far less costs and with few side effects. A way to counter the growing demand for natural remedies is to confuse the public with misinformation.

The misinformation campaign is working. The natural products industry reports their growth has leveled off. Vitamin C sales were off by 19.2 percent last year. In the past months dubious negative reports have been published on garlic and St. John’s wort. A characteristic of all these reports is their emphatic conclusion that all previous research which confirmed the validity of these natural remedies are now to be discarded because the latest single scientific report reached a contrary conclusion.

Last year, the news media made a front page headline story out of a presentation on vitamin C at the American Heart Association meeting. The study the news wires relied upon hadn’t even been published in any peer reviewed scientific journal. Nonetheless, the national wire services were quick to release the story that high-dose vitamin C could clog arteries in the neck (the carotids). Vitamin C does not clog arteries, but it does strengthen and thicken the walls of arteries via its ability to promote collagen formation.

How do these non-news stories get front-page coverage? It’s simple. Public relations agencies have bragged at seminars how they can take a presentation at a medical meeting and get it aired on television and published in newspapers. These publicity agencies do the dirty work of planting misinformation in the news media. It’s propaganda, not news, and certainly not credible science unless it is published in the peer reviewed literature.

Bad science gets front-page coverage regardless of whether it is true or not. Local newspapers, such as the BDN rely upon the news wire services for these stories. However, the news wire journalists aren’t checking on the validity of medical reports, and they aren’t interviewing the opposing views. In the case of the recent vitamin C report, the reporters did not interview the National Nutritional Foods Association, the Council for Responsible Nutrition, the Vitamin C Foundation nor the Healthcare Products Association.

How long can the public be fooled? Why are the pharmaceutical companies so afraid of a simple vitamin? It’s because high doses of vitamin C virtually eradicate the risk of developing cataracts, eliminate the need for blood pressure medication, reduce the need for anti-allergy drugs, reduce the risk of gall stones, and produce many other health benefits. The drug companies cannot invent nor patent a molecule as efficacious as vitamin C.

Dr. Moshe Myerowitz, D.C. is a chiropractor practicing in the Bangor area.