If vitamins are so bad why is FDA giving them to PhRMA

Update: April 2011 - CDC: Half of US adults take vitamins, supplements

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical WriterWed Apr 13, 1:50 pm ET

ATLANTA – About half of U.S. adults take vitamins and other dietary supplements — a level that's been holding steady for much of the past decade, new government figures show.

But the data also show a booming number of older women are taking calcium.

Federal officials released figures Wednesday showing that the use of dietary supplements has grown since the early 1990s when it was about 42 percent. The data shows use leveled off in 2003 through 2008, with about half of adults 20 and older taking at least one dietary supplement.

The biggest change was for calcium. Two-thirds of women 60 and older take it, up from 28 percent in the early 1990s.

Experts note the ranks of the elderly have been growing, and include many women who have been encouraged for years to take calcium to help protect against osteoporosis.

The information comes from national, in-home surveys in 1988-1994 and 2003-2008. The surveys in the past decade included more than 2,000 people each year. Interviewers not only asked participants what supplements they took, but also asked to see the bottles to verify their answers.

Use of multivitamins — the most popular supplement — crept up to nearly 40 percent.

Most people who take vitamins and other supplements are educated, have good incomes, eat pretty well and already get the nutrients they need from their diets, the surveys suggests.

"It's almost like the people who are taking them aren't the people who need them," said Regan Bailey, a nutritional epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health.

Federal surveys have only recently started asking people why they take supplements, Bailey said.

The government supports some supplements as an option for certain people — such as iron for women who are pregnant, folic acid for women thinking of getting pregnant and calcium for older women.

But health officials say people should talk to their doctors first, and consider enriched foods that can accomplish the same goal.

Much of the new data is in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Wednesday. SOURCE

Online: CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs

Read more on Natural Health News

March 2011

Don’t Be a Victim of Drug Company Propaganda

It is in the economic interests of drug companies to steer Americans away from healthier lifestyles and dietary supplements. As more Americans fall ill to degenerative disease, drug company profits increase exponentially.

Enormous amounts of pharmaceutical dollars are spent influencing Congress, the FDA, and other federal agencies. The result is the promulgation of policies that cause Americans to be deprived of effective, low-cost means of protecting themselves against age-related disease.
The fact that the diets of more than 90% of Americans supply less than the 12 milligrams a day of vitamin E the government proclaims to be adequate is a startling revelation. It documents an epidemic deficiency of vitamin E among Americans who do not take supplements. Despite these grim statistics, the medical establishment continues to question the value of supplemental vitamin E. SOURCE

APRIL 2010
Help protect your right to supplements -

Alert: Protect Your Right To Natural and Bio-available Vitamin B-6!
ANH-USA On April 6, 2010 @ 3:18 pm

Human beings cannot live without vitamin B-6. It is also important for the prevention of cancer and the prevention and treatment of seizures, anemia, mental disorders including schizophrenia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other conditions. Its effect on carpal tunnel can seem almost miraculous [1].

A natural form of the vitamin, Pyridoxamine, was recently yanked off the market by the FDA. Why? Because a pharmaceutical company, BioStratum, wanted sole use of pyridoxamine in a drug, a drug which may or may not ever appear. The company filed a so-called citizens petition and the FDA agreed, notwithstanding protests from ANH-USA, other organizations, and thousands of citizens. You might ask: how can Pharma take a supplement off the market and claim exclusive use of it as a prescription drug? The FDA does not presently feel obligated to answer this question.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all the bad news about vitamin B6. All forms of B-6, natural or synthetic, must be converted to P5P, another natural form, for the body to use it. Another drug company, Medicure Pharma, wants sole use of P5P and so has petitioned the FDA to ban its use as a supplement as well.

Medicure has yet to market a drug made from P5P, but wants the ban to take place now. And never mind that any individual unable to convert synthetic B6 to P5P would have to rely solely on Medicure’s product to stay alive.

How does Medicure think it can get away with this? Its petition states rather candidly: “Pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs must be protected from companies that may seek to market the ingredients in those drugs as dietary supplements. The marketing of such products has the potential to undermine the incentive for the development of new drugs because many people may choose to purchase the supplements rather than the drugs.”

This is not of course a case of supplement producers creating a product to compete with an existing prescription drug. It is just the reverse. P5P, the natural and bioactive form of B6, has existed in food for as long as there have been humans and has been available as a supplement for years. Medicure seems to be saying: If it seems profitable, let’s just turn a critical vitamin, one essential for human life, into a drug, make it available only by subscription, and mark up the price. This is truly outrageous.

The FDA has not yet responded to Medicure’s petition. We have asked you in the past to send a message to the FDA and Congress protesting Medicure’s P5P grab, and the time has come to send some more messages. So if you haven’t sent in a message to the FDA and Congress yet, or even if you have, please send one today [2].

[2]

While we are discussing Vitamin B6, here is the latest scientific report. An analysis of 13 U.S., European and Asian studies of vitamin B6 and colon cancer, conducted from 2002-2009, has been published in a special edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Studies of the range of B6 doses found that vitamin B6 taken in higher doses reduced the risk of colon cancer by 21 percent. In one study, Dr. Susanna Larsson and her colleagues at Sweden’s National Institute of Environmental Medicine reported an inverse relationship between the intake of vitamin B6 or pyridoxine and the risk of colon cancer. Dr. Larsson linked the effect to bloodstream levels of pyridoxal-phosphate (PLP), the main active coenzyme form of vitamin B6 [3]. Pyridoxal-phosphate is also known as pyridoxal 5-phosphate or (as we referred to it above) P5P.

Don’t let the FDA take away our access to the natural and most bioavailable form of B6, P5P. Please take action now [2].


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Article printed from Alliance for Natural Health – US: http://www.anh-usa.org

URL to article: http://www.anh-usa.org/alert-protect-your-right-to-natural-and-bio-available-vitamin-b-6/

URLs in this post:

[1] Its effect on carpal tunnel can seem almost miraculous: http://search.vitasearch.com/search?q=pyridoxine+carpal+tunnel+syndrome&restrict=Summaries&site=CP&client=CP&proxystylesheet=CP&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=0&getfields=*

[2] please send one today: https://secure3.convio.net/aahf/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=334

[3] inked the effect to bloodstream levels of pyridoxal-phosphate (PLP), the main active coenzyme form of vitamin B6: http://www.physorg.com/print187978106.html