Around the water cooler, across the bridge table, almost anywhere someone sneezes, coughs or complains, the conversation often turns to vitamins, minerals and herbs.
Feeding those impromptu medical consultations are reports from respected journals and medical school laboratories suggesting which vitamin or herb may be the next cure-all. As a result, a responsive public eager to stay well or get well descends on supermarkets, drugstores and health-food stores to buy up the vitamin of the moment.
Crowds of customers with an eye to preventive medicine stuff shopping bags with organically grown fruits and vegetables high in beta carotene, vitamin C and fiber, breads made from unprocessed flour at the Fresh Fields supermarket in Palatine. The store, a member of a growing national chain based in Rockville, Md., that sells foods devoid of artificial additives, meats free of hormones and household products without phosphates has seen a non-stop flow of customers since it opened in midsummer on Dundee Road just south of the Lake County border.
Drugstore and supermarket employees have seen a healthy rise in vitamin sales. Officials at Walgreen’s headquarters in Deerfield were reluctant to release statistics, but one official confirmed “a definite increase in vitamin sales.”
Dominick’s Finer Foods consumer affairs manager Cheryl Robertson said the same was true at her stores. But she attributed part of that rise to a deliberate company expansion of drug department items. “Vitamins have received an increased emphasis from us,” Robertson said.
The biggest sellers, she said, are multiple vitamins, vitamins E, C and B complex and children’s vitamins. Health food store manager Kim Miller, who works for Nutrition World (recently bought by Nature Food Center) in Highland Park, said many customers have been taking vitamins for years. Surges in popularity come on the heels of talk show discussions and releases of studies, she said, but she added that supplement popularity reflects a larger movement toward home medicating.
“People have gone to alternative medicine. We’ve seen a tremendous increase since 1990 of people looking to take care of themselves.”
But why heed the literature and talk show litany?
“The cost of medical care (is too high). And people prefer vitamins to drugs,” Miller said. But she cautioned that supplements are only part of the health picture. “They won’t take care of everything. A person who eats wrong, who thinks he or she can compensate with vitamins, is taking the wrong approach.”
Megadosing on vitamins and herbs does not mean everything will be fine, according to Miller. “People can overdose. People should ask their doctor.”
Dr. William Dam of Fox Lake, who believes that vitamins and a nutritional diet are essential, also thinks supplements can be overdone. “Some supplements can be taken improperly. An excess of some supplements can be harmful,” such as vitamin A, which can cause liver damage if taken to excess.
But checking with a doctor is not as simple as it sounds, because opinions of doctors vary as widely as they do among the public.
Dr. M. Roy Schwarz, senior vice president of the Chicago-based American Medical Association in charge of education and science, will not rule out the benefits of taking megadoses of specific vitamins. But he wants stronger proof that dosages above the standard recommended daily amount will improve health rather than lead to further problems.
Schwarz cautioned against misinterpreting study results. For example, it needs to be clear that the vitamins being tested, not differences in diet or lifestyle, are responsible for the positive results of such tests. He remains “very skeptical” about the studies he has seen on the benefits of vitamins A and E.
“The studies about A and E use words such as `may’ and `suggest.’ The studies need to be more definitive, have a larger sampling and tight controls that rule out other factors,” Schwarz said. Still, he acknowledged that such studies “ought to be pursued,” adding, “We need to move the `may’ to `does’ or `doesn’t.”‘
Schwarz said he is interested to see what the National Institutes of Health’s recently formed Office of Alternative Medicine will find about the health benefits of herb supplements.
Dr. Douglas R. Finlayson, a primary care physician who sees patients at clinics in Fox Lake and Rolling Meadows and works with nutritionist Janet M. Aretos-Angel, thinks doctors’ reluctance to endorse dietary supplements reflects more on medical training than on the studies.
“It’s still pretty minimal what they’re learning about nutrition. What they do learn (in medical school), they’re learning from doctors whose own education was skewed toward drug treatment,” as opposed to vitamins, Finlayson said.
A doctor for 25 years, Finlayson said his adoption of nutrition as a path to wellness evolved from the drug approach to the nutritional avenue. “I learned that a lot of problems can be treated much more effectively with nutrition than drugs. And the long-term outcome was better. People feel better and live longer. And that should be the bottom line of treatment,” he said. “Vitamins and minerals definitely help. A lot of studies show they really do help. But vitamins and supplements are just a part of it. It’s everything you put in your mouth.”
For example, he said, people with high blood pressure are taking drugs that produce side effects, but it’s been shown that a lot of people with high blood pressure can be treated with nutrition.
He sees negative publicity about supplements as spurred by profit motives of drug manufacturers. “If a drug came out that reduced the risk of cancer by 20 percent, there would be an enormous ad campaign. But with just something you can buy off the shelf, there’s not the profit. Beta carotene significantly reduces the risk of cancer, but there’s no profit,” he said.
Pinning anyone down to compare a vitamin vs. a drug on effectiveness and price is nearly impossible. But here is a loose, unscientific comparison: A 60-day supply of 20-milligram tablets of a drug used to lower cholesterol costs $97.65 at a discount drugstore; 200 capsules of Kyolic, a garlic extract that some studies have shown to have similar cholesterol-lowering qualities, costs $20.
Federal Food and Drug Administration officials have stepped in to take a strong look at supplements and health claims made by their makers. The FDA asked for public input this summer on rules and regulations it may impose on supplements as early as January.
Basically, the agency wants to crack down on product claims not substantiated by scientific proof. Though some doctors and members of the supplement industry said they welcome FDA safeguards, others object to any FDA interpretation of laws that would allow the agency to categorize supplements as drugs or restrict public access to vitamins, minerals or herbs.
To illustrate the possible future impact of FDA regulations, some health food stores participated in a nationwide blackout day on Aug. 13 by refusing to sell some herbal preparations. This was a protest to alert customers to potential FDA restrictions.
Michael Taylor, deputy commissioner of policy for the FDA, denied claims that the FDA wants to take away access. The agency’s goal, he said, is “to ensure consumer access to safe dietary supplements.” He emphasized the word “safe,” which he said means that if a company claims its product cures cancer, the company had better be prepared to prove it. But Taylor agreed that not all herbs bathed by medicinal lore must be classified as drugs.
“It depends upon how it is marketed,” he said. Garlic? Several studies have touted the bulb’s blood-thinning, cholesterol-lowering characteristics. “No. that’s already established as a food,” he said.
What about the vitamins and minerals? Here again, studies hype their value in fighting everything from cancer to colds. “We’re not getting into vitamin and mineral supplements,” he said-for now.
Jim Golick, an Elmhurst nutritionist who teaches a nutrition course at the College of Du Page and is on the board of Citizens for Health, a not-for-profit international organization based in Tacoma, Wash., interpreted the FDA’s move to regulate supplements as forcing people to use drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies. Citizens for Health, which organized two years ago to promote alternative medicine research, has 45 chapters across the country. Its board includes doctors and nutritionistists.
