Studies: Don't Rely on Vitamins to Reduce Breast-Cancer, Heart-Attack Risk

Vitamins don’t cut heart-attack and breast-cancer risks, studies say.

Are you taking your vitamins? Well new research shows that despite years of being told vitamin supplements are good for us, they may not do as much as we thought.

The Los Angeles Times reports that two new studies published today show that supplements don’t greatly reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes or breast cancer.

The breast cancer study, reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was part of an effort to determine whether a combined pill of 1,000 milligrams of calcium and 400 IUs of vitamin D could help prevent hip fractures.

Since some studies suggested vitamin D and calcium might reduce the risk of breast cancer, the researchers decided to track that too. It tracked 36,282 postmenopausal women for an average of seven years and found that a daily regimen of vitamin D and calcium did not offer any protection against invasive breast cancer.

The study concluded that, “calcium and vitamin D supplementation did not reduce invasive breast-cancer incidence in postmenopausal women. In addition, 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels were not associated with subsequent breast-cancer risk. These findings do not support a relationship between total vitamin D intake and 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels with breast-cancer risk.”

But other researchers said to not rule out the benefit of vitamin D, while other studies suggest the daily dose should be more than what was used in the trial. They also said vitamin supplements could be more valuable to premenopausal women.

"Take it anyway, for other reasons," Dr. Rowan Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, told the Times.

In the second study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found that the 14,641 middle-aged male physicians who took vitamins E and C for an average of eight years didn’t see any benefit to their cardiovascular health.

“These data provide no support for the use of these supplements in the prevention of cardiovascular disease in middle-aged and older men,” the study says.

You can read about the entire study and its conclusions here.