Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Vitamins

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

Welcome to Sawbones, where Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin McElroy take you on a whimsical tour of the dumb ways in which we've tried to fix people. This week: We eat like 50 lemons. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, Tommy is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

The medicines, the medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth Hello everybody and welcome to saw bones a mantle tour this guy did medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McRoy I'm Sydney McRoy good news said what is that we've got the food of 2014 Food of 2014 I have selected my food of 2014 now. I'm really excited to hear what it is But before you tell me I think you should probably explain why you have a food if you're working. I a lot of people probably don't do this. I didn't intend to do it, but I found that every year there's a new food

that I get super deep into that I hadn't previously been a big fan of. Do you remember the first thing? French onion soup. That was back in 2011. I remember that. Yeah, 2011 was a big year for French onion soup. I tried it for the first time and I just lost my mind. And I was sad for all the French onion soup I'd missed before that point. And then the year after that I think it was ketchup.

Ketchup was, yeah, ketchup was 2012. Huge year for me and ketchup had never been a fan. Then I just couldn't get enough of the stuff. Yeah, he had never really eaten ketchup. Yeah, then I got super deep in the ketchup in 2012. And then 2013 was yogurt. Big year for yogurt for me. Just getting... His diet was very limited, I think, prior to I don't mean. If you guys tried yogurt, if you guys try this thing yogurt, it is a,'s a it's a it's great. But anyway, we got a new smash food for 2014 and it is salad. Oh great choice. Thank you. Well, my brother Griffin has a system called cookie points where he orders me points I can redeem for cookies dependent on salad and our vegetables that I eat. So I wanted to

start racking up more cookie points and the best way of doing that is to eat a It's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very This is great the best thing about talented. What is that other than that crunchy taste that you just can't get enough of and it fills you up and also croutons Right, right. We'll definitely croutons No, the best thing about it is the vitamins Okay green and leafy means vitamins for me. V. Do you think that everything green and leafy has? That's where all vitamins are. It is extremely. Yeah, that's where your high concentration and the vitamins are.

And I know that doesn't mean salad. I'm getting a lot of vitamins. Which vitamins in particular do you think you're getting? Vietamins. D? Vitamin D or maybe K. Well, maybe. Yes. Maybe. Well, okay.

Do you know what? Do you know anything about vitamins? I literally don't. I literally suggested this sub-oant's topic to you because I have no idea what vitamins are. I don't know if you've got a big pile of vitamins, would it be like dust? Like what, I don't know what vitamins are. Well, why don't I tell you what vitamins are?

Tell me what vitamins are. I have no idea. I'll be eating a salad. First of all, so what are vitamins? I think it's a good place to start. What are vitamins? So the definition of vitamins are organic compounds that humans or whatever organism we're talking about. Let's say humans for, you know, argument say, since we are humans. Humans.

That we absolutely need to survive in small amounts, but we can't make ourselves. So that's what constitutes a vitamin. If something meets those criteria, if it's an organic compound, that we have to have to survive in very small amounts, but we can't make it. So we need to get it from the food we eat, right? The name comes actually from vital amine, vital because it's vital to our survival, and amine because amine is a kind of a type of chemical compound, has a certain group of acids. Sort of. Amine refers specifically to a certain configuration of chemicals. But anyway, the important thing is not all vitamins are amines. So the vitamins used to be called vitamins, like with an E on the end, but they later dropped

the E and just became vitamin because they found that there are many vitamins that aren't actually amines. Or well, I shouldn't say many, just really important ones that aren't a means. So, vitamin, that's where it comes from. Vitamin, got it. So it's not a new idea that there are things we need from certain foods that are important. This was something that even before we ever knew what a vitamin was the ancient Egyptians recognized that if Somebody had night blindness and they ate a whole bunch of liver They got better

Now they didn't know why that worked. They probably thought it was magic Yeah, they probably did they probably thought I had something to do with with the I don't know the Egyptian God of liver Don Don the Egyptian God of liver. Dawn. Dawn, the Egyptian god of liver. He got like last pick and like the. Oh, liver, I guess. Sure.

It was actually because liver contains vitamin A. And if you have vitamin A deficiency, you can get night blindness. Did they discover vitamin A first? No, they didn't discover any of that. They just put together that if you eat liver, you won't be night blind. But was vitamin A the first one they came up with?

Like was, or did they just call it vitamin? Well, they didn't call it anything. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah, you're getting way ahead of yourself. Sorry. Now let's, I'll get to liver. I'll get to start saying it in vitamins. Here's how we establish so far.

Liver. Okay, move it on. And this is similar as this is the story about vitamins that probably most people know, scurvy. I know that one, vitamin C, pirates. Okay, sailors, not just pirates. I think sailors could get to vitamin C. I think it was more a problem for pirates. Sailors had the fourth site to bring citrus fruits with them. Pirates had the plunder to try to get citrus

fruits. Do you think that's what pirates were after citrus fruits? Shiver Meal Emines. Stupid. What if you could only get what if you had scurvy papity only you could get with lemons? That's kind of a bummer. That's actually a good thing. What if you could only get what if you had scurvy? But the only thing you could get was lemons. That's kind of a bummer. That's actually a good thing. What? Well, I know about it.

But not for flavor. Oh, well, no, but provide them and see it's a good thing. I don't know. After months of sea, Milliman may not be sick, but anyway, sorry, getting distracted by lemons. So, scurvy, as most of you probably already know, it was a disease that

involved gum bleeding. I think it's the thing everybody remembers right? Not always the thing people say like oh your gums are bleeding you've got scurvy. I think of like being hunched over that's what I think it was scurvy. I have a hunchback. Well not necessarily a hunchback but like you'd be really tired and weak so you might walk hunched over. Okay that worked. And it seemed to disproportionately affect sailors, but also they noticed like a seasonal variation during winter months,

people were more likely to get scurvy. Which would make sense because in a time before we could have anything we want any time of the year, you wouldn't have access to citrus fruits. That makes perfect sense to me. During the winter. In 1747, James Lind noticed this and figured out that fresh fruits seem to cruise, that had

access to fresh fruits, seem not to get the disease notice curvy. And so he started advising crews to take fresh fruits with them, not again, not knowing about vitamin C or what anything was, just knowing that people who ate fresh fruit didn't get scurvy. Now, obviously, like any other good idea, it was completely rejected at first. Oh yeah, nobody believes this.

Maybe they're sailors, they don't need that kind of junk. Fruits or sissies, Well, I have meat and steak. Meat and steak. Meat and salted steak. That's what fills a sailor's belly. Arrgg. Didn't they just eat like hard tack? Hard tack and salted steak and meat.

That's a lot of meat, shit for me, Denver. They actually thought that scurvy was caused by having bad hygiene and that it happened when the sailors more owl was low So if you just like I don't know throw a pizza party for them. I don't know Captain I Not thinking just the skirvy's that's the Mondays before Before they had the Mondays they didn't have Mondays in pirate time So they would call them the skirmies. That's what Garfield had he had scurvy pirate Garfield back in that that time in the

167's or the others he had he had the skirmies you don't get enough vitamin C from lasagna That's absolutely accurate in the 1800s there was a lot of interest in trying to figure out out what is a good diet. What do you need to survive? I don't know if this was so that we could feed the poor as little as absolutely possible. But one way or another, we were trying to figure out which things are critical to survival in a diet. The way that they went about trying to figure out which things are important was by feeding various animals, especially mice, just certain components of the diet, and then seeing like which ones lived and which ones

died, and trying to piece together like, okay, if we give this one just protein and this one just carbs, and what if we give this one protein and carbs, and what they found, and like the control was milk, they would give them mice milk for the control group. And what they found is that... That's half carbs, half protein. No, but it has, they knew that mice survived when they had milk. So what they kept finding was that they would break milk down into the main constituents, which you did say protein and carbs, it also has fat and it also has salt on it. So they would break milk down into those components and then feed it to mice altogether.

So one group of mice got milk and the other group got protein, carbs, fat and salt. And those mice still died, which led them to believe there was something in milk that we need, that we can't isolate that easily. Something we don't know about yet. So there is something in like naturally occurring foods. I get well-timing people a hard time a lot in this program. That's actually pretty good, pretty good, thinking back then.

It was a good way to illustrate that there was more to food than what we knew at the time, but we still were a long way from figuring out exactly what that was. This continued in the late 1800s with some experiments with the Japanese Navy. They were eating mainly a diet of polished rice, which means that they would remove the husk from the rice kernel, the rice grain, yeah, the rice grain. And they found that the crew, you know, like the, I don't know, the lowest wrong of the Navy.

Right. Whatever, I don't know, any drink about ranks. The peasants. The peasants in the Navy. The naval peasants. Okay. They were just eating rice, this polished rice, and they were all getting sick. And the officers were eating like normal diets, like normal human diets, with varied foods,

not just rice, and they were not getting sick. And specifically, they were getting sick with something called berry berry. Berry berry causes a lot of different symptoms. Some of the more notable ones, difficulty walking and like pain and your numbness and tingling and your legs and feet, it can even lead to dementia, heart failure, it can make you really sick. So it was a big deal, you know, you're a lot of members of your neighbor being stricken by this horrible disease. The way they figured out what was probably the cause was actually chickens. They were feeding like naval surplus rice to chickens, and they found that chickens that were eating this like sweet, sweet navy rice were getting very, very, more often.

And yet chickens who were just eating like natural unprocessed rice didn't get this disease. So they figured out that there's something in like the husk of the rice grain. No, we needed to to thrive. Exactly. That we need to survive. It turned out to be a B1 vitamin thiamine. We didn't know that again at the time, but this is when we really thought, okay, so we know where this thing that is important exists. It's in this little husk on the rice grain. Let's start trying to find it. And so that was the first one we did discover. In 1910, we found thiamine or vitamin B1, as it was later known, in rice bran.

And after that, the rice was basically on. To find vitamins. Yes. So we figured out there was this one vitamin. We guess there were probably a lot more. And over the next 30 years, that's exactly what people did. They started isolating vitamins.

Initially, there were like vitamins A, B, C, we know about A, B, C, D, E, right? We know about all those and then K. And a lot of people are like, well, why, you know about A, B, C, D, E, right? Right. We know about all those and then K. And a lot of people are like, well, why, you know, why do we skip around? It's a great question. I'm aware of the other vitamins. I hope you're not asking me.

I hope you're researching. No, I know. I'm going to tell you why. Thank God. Because initially they just kept naming them each after a letter of the alphabet, A and then B and K, and they kept going on, except they started to discover that a lot of these vitamins were really closely related.

So then they started grouping them all as B vitamins. That's why you get B1, 2, 3, etc. There were also a lot of other letters of the alphabet, as you can tell, specifically between E and K. Yeah, we skipped around there. Right. But we eliminated all those when we grouped and we grouped B vitamins. And then there are some things that we figured out

that weren't vitamins. Like, we can make that so it doesn't classify the vitamin or it's not really important. Did we stop at K? Is there a vitamin L? I don't know about that. There were other vitamins, but they've been eliminated. Oh, man, I miss those vitamins.

What if we needed those? What if that's what makes you super tall? There was the proposed vitamin S at one point. From salad. No. I proposed it earlier. We can pretend it's salad. Okay, what was it?

Salicylic acid. But that's not a vitamin. What's the difference? Well, I don't know, we don't need it. We just decided. We just decided it wasn't a vitamin. Fine, got you scientists. I don't know, it didn't fit the definition.

Fine. It's not a vitamin. Fine. That's the important thing. And as we were discovering all these vitamins, a lot of people won Nobel prizes for them. And... Vitamin fever was sweeping the scientific community.

Right, it was like a really exciting time if you're into vitamins and I am Look at how much salad I eat. We isolated all these vitamins. We figured out what Must be in a healthy diet and this was when we started you know realizing like okay Well, Rickets is caused by vitamin D deficiency So people need enough vitamin D to prevent that. Scurvy is vitamin C, and there are all kinds of things. You can get anemia if you don't have B6 or B12, and there were dermatitis and blindness can result from lack of vitamin A, bleeding problems from lack of vitamin K. So we figured all this out, and that's great.

The end. And there were no problems. Perfect. Until. Perfect. Until. Until. Obviously, there's some break where we stop seeing vitamins as something that we're supposed to make sure

we eat the right foods to get that small amount that we need to survive. And we start considering vitamins, something we're all supposed to take as a health supplement, which I think is kind of how they're viewed today. Yeah, kind of magic.'re viewed today. Yeah. Come on, magic bullet. I think if you have enough of these vitamins, then you'll be fine.

There were, of course, a lot of people do in experiments before what I'm going to mention with vitamins, trying to figure out if a little bit is good is a lot better. But Linus Pauling is really where we see vitamins take off. Now, if you are in, if you are a of a science mind, if you are a science person, and you know I am, you've probably heard of Linus Pauling.

Oh, sure. Tell me one thing about Linus Pauling, honey. I have your sheet in front of me, that's not really fair. Oh, okay. Before you looked at my sheet, did you know anything about Linus Pauling? No I didn't.

So here let me just say this before I start making fun of him. He was a really brilliant scientist. Like super smart guy. He won two Nobel Nobel prizes. The first one he wrote about the bonds between elements. And when he submitted his paper to be reviewed, they actually sent it to Einstein to look at. Wow.

Because they didn't think there was anybody smart enough to figure out, like, is this paper good? Is this stuff correct? This guy making this up. And Einstein looked at it and was like I don't know It's way smarter than I am basically. Wow, so this is the guy This this is how smart this guy is The second Nobel Prize he won by the way was for peace He won a peace prize because he worked really hard to stop nuclear proliferation He refused to join the Manhattan Project because as as you can imagine, they wanted him for

it. Right. He was instrumental in creating the nuclear test band treaty. I mean, he was a really great, smart, super cool guy. Cool. But when he was 65, I think he must have gone a little nutty. All right. He didn't get enough vitamin K or vitamin S maybe.

He gave a lecture about, I don't know, something sciencey. And during the lecture, he talked about, you know, when if he is lucky enough to live another 25 years, then perhaps we'll see any talked about scientific advancement. So total just throw away line in his little lecture, but a doctor, Irwin Stone, who I should clarify was not actually a doctor per se. He studied chemistry for two years, and he got an honorary degree from a chiropractic school, and then he got a PhD from a correspondence school that didn't have a

accreditation. So we lose, we use doctor here very loosely. He was at the lecture like Dr. Phil could. Yes, like Dr. Phil could. Or Dr. Pepper, right. So Dr. Erwin Stone was at the lecture and he wrote him a letter afterwards and he was like, hey, look, I can make sure you live 25 more years or even way longer than that. All you got to do is take 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day. That's a lot, it seems. It is. It's well above the recommend daily value. One might say it's three grams of vitamin C. That's true. That is true. And for some reason, this brilliant genius scientist did it. This is the problem with super smart people I think that a lot of people miss and we see repeated thematically throughout history and I think this probably applies to a

lot of the people on our program is that smart people are so smart they can talk themselves into almost anything. I think this must have been one of those cases and I don't know maybe it was also a little bit of like, he was 65 and he was starting to look down the road and think like, I don't know, I'm smart enough to know. I only have so many more years left. Maybe I'll give it a shot. Who knows?

So he tried it and he felt better. So he took more than that and he thought he felt even better. Wow. And then he was off. So vitamin C oranges get out of the way. Don't keep an orange around this cat. He has to eat like insane uh, wimpy level amounts. Uh, like as wimpy is to hamburgers, the stillman is to oranges. Do not let an orange get into his, he's like Mr. Peepers. Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm just destroyed. That's a hit Saturday Night Live reference you're making.

It's not as old as my freaking, Popeye reference from 15 seconds earlier though. Thank you for letting that one slide. So in 1971, Lina's Pauline wrote Vitamin C in the Common Cold, which sold, it was a book he wrote and it sold like crazy. I would imagine it probably sold a lot more copies than the paper he wrote on the bonds between electrons and various elements. I think he maybe just wanted some money.

It sounds like he wanted, he was worried about Vitamin C, R, E, A, A, M, I think cash rolls everything around me. He wanted to get hate. My spine was no nut. He was willing to eat 30 oranges a day if it meant he could sell you his stupid book. He was a man of science. I like to think that at least he truly believed this.

Yeah. He believed that you could take massive doses of vitamin C. And it would not only cure your cold if you had it, but it would prevent you from ever getting a cold. And in this way, we could completely eradicate the common cold. I'm being pretty hard on a dude that is putting out some things that I,

myself, have attempted upon getting a cold. Yes, you have. Absolutely. That's part of why we're going to talk about vitamin C quite a bit. Excellent. In 73, he added flu to this. He actually talked about predicting like swine flu epidemics that could happen in the

future and dead, to be fair. But he thought we could have prevented all these epidemics that have happened since by just eating enough vitamin C. And in response to this, vitamin sales went bonkers. Everybody was reading this book and going out and buying as much vitamin C as they could. Couldn't make it fast enough. This, even at this point in 71,

was not a particularly new idea. I mean, I already talked about this so-called Dr. Erwin Stone, who came up with this idea. It wasn't his idea either. A lot of people had tried to prove, you know, if a little is good, a lot is better, and no studies had ever really shown any benefits. It's a very potent idea though, if you don't have,

if you're not looking at the data, that this thing is good for this thing. So, as my old drama teacher, Professor Anthony used to say, one rubber chicken is funny, one thousand rubber chickens, one thousand times as funny. Well, I think that vitamin C, I think that's a good comparison because vitamin C is about effective, effective on a cold as a rubber chicken would do. So there you go. And no matter how many more studies were done in response to his claims and the publicity that vitamin C was getting, proving that it didn't have any impact on a cold, it didn't

matter. The impact of his book was not to be touched by any science at that point. So he took it a step further. He added cancer. Uh-oh. He got hooked up with a Scottish surgeon who had done a study where he gave 10 grams of vitamin C a day, 10 grams. So that's a lot of vitamin C. A lot of vitamin C. To cancer patients in an effort to help them get better faster. And what his study showed is that the patients that got it, that got the vitamin C, he felt were improving, in addition to their chemotherapy and everything, were improving faster than the patients who didn't. So he sent a copy of a study to Linus Pauline, and Linus Pauline

was, of course, thrilled. Deeply into it. He tried to get it published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is abbreviated, can you say that they're for me, Joseph? Penas. Penas, penis. Penas.

Yeah, the scientist really, do you have to be that oblivious? No, I like to think they don't realize it. No. Come on. Come on. You're giving us all a bad name. Come on. Like some of us have common sense.

So he tried to get it published there, because he was a member, and it was essentially a given that if you submitted a study and you were a member of this, you know, group that your study would be published because it was a respect thing. There'd been like one turned down ever or something and this one was turned down. This was number two. This was number two.

It did later get published in a journal on ecology, obviously because oncologists would be interested in this study, but it was picked apart as well. They found lots of flaws in the study. The people who were given the vitamin C were already healthier and already doing better and less advanced in their cancer. And so there were all kinds of flaws with the way this study was set up. I'm guessing this cow is not deterred. Oh no, no, not at all.

For the next decade, this led to oncologist studying vitamin C. Oh, blind alley. On cancer patients. On cancer patients. Because as you can imagine, as soon as this became an issue in the media, as soon as this was a big thing, and patients and patients family started hearing about it,

they were clamoring for more research. They were asking their doctors, can we give, can we try the vitamin C thing? This brilliant guy Pauline says it works. There's that study. So they did all these studies, and again, they didn't really show anything. We're still not seeing any positive effects from giving megalosis of vitamin C to patients. So then he decided, you know what, vitamin C starting to get old, and eventually they're going to be on to the fact that it's not working. So let's add some other vitamins. Oh, good.

Branch out. So he added vitamin A, vitamin E, and then he threw in a couple other things, selenium, beta carotene, in addition to your vitamin C, of course. Don't stop your vitamin C. And if you will take this regimen, I have a paragraph here of things you can fix. Pretty much anything. The big ones like heart disease, that's pretty big polio, big deal of the time to burculosis ulcers, you know, diabetes. Just looking at this list here, asthma, a heat frustration wounds there. It's in a wolverine apparently. And this is Gary Wuppen-Gov-Leprosy.

Hey, Veeber. Uh, stress, stress, rabies, snake bites. And also it says here, AIDS. Yeah. So as the, um, as HIV became a known illness in this, the AIDS epidemic hit the US. He went ahead and threw that on the list too. So that sounds suspiciously to me like a cure all Sydney. And as we know from doing us over 60 episodes, the saw bones are so cure all.

Cure nothing. Absolutely. This vitamin fever that was now sweeping the country, because it really was in response to, as you can imagine, in response to patients demand for vitamins, vitamin manufacturers were making more and more and more. More companies were popping up with different combinations of vitamins and billing them for different things things because with every Study that was done that you know investigated something people at least were wanting to try it out themselves because it gives it

I think just doing a study gives it an air of credibility Yeah I think so if you are studying whether or not vitamin C can cure cancer then Somebody thinks vitamin C is people people somewhere are looking at yeah. And so this led to in 1992, a time magazine running a cover story about vitamins, which talked about a lot of some of these crazy claims, not saying that they were necessarily true, but just throwing them out there and not mentioning the fact that there wasn't any evidence for them.

And so at this point, everybody wanted to take a vitamin. And I should say at this point, what the theory was. Because at this, by the time this time, magazine article ran, they had a justification for why they thought, even those studies weren't bearing it out, why they thought taking megalosis of vitamin C, A, E, whatever, would actually make you healthier. Why is that? So you've heard of antioxidants. Right. The general idea, I think, from a layperson standpoint,

is that oxidation in your body is bad. Right? Agreed? We want antioxidants, right? Right. Because you rust and the inside. Because you rust and the inside goes your action winds down. Got it. The real reason is that oxidation causes free radicals. And if even if you don't know if free radicals are, you've heard their bad. And some of the rust being knocked off and

floating around your body. Basically. Kind of. Let's go. That's not rust, but yeah, I like that analogy. Okay. So even if you don't know what free radicals are You know they're bad Mm-hmm. They kill things they kill cells they damage our DNA So if vitamins are in oxidants and oxidation is bad Taking more vitamins will stop more oxidation It will stop damage to ourselves. It will stop damaging DNA, we will not age as quickly and we will live longer. It sounds like it can be healthier.

It sounds exactly right to me. Except that we keep doing studies and showing that it isn't. So this is when things get really scary. After everybody goes crazy taking vitamins, we start doing big giant meta-analysis, big studies that look at all studies. A meta-analysis is an analysis of other analyses, if that makes sense. We're looking at a ton of different studies all at once. So now we're looking at like hundreds of thousands of patients and the effective vitamins on them. So we did these huge studies in 94, 96, 2004, 5, 7, 8, and 11. So these are multiple studies over many years. And they looked at people who took multivitamins, people who

took vitamin C, people took vitamin A, combos of vitamins, all versus people who didn't. And here's the scary thing. Not only did they find that people who didn't. And here's the scary thing. Not only did they find that people who take vitamins don't live any longer than people who don't take vitamins, but they found that people who take vitamins are more likely to develop problems like lung cancer, prostate cancer, and heart disease.

And that they didn't fare as well when they were battling certain cancers in other conditions. So they actually, this got so bad, the study that they did in 96, the differences between the two groups were so drastic that they had to stop the study. Because if you're seeing, you know, if you've got a study where you're testing this out, like if I give group A, this drug, and and group B doesn't let's see who does better. If group A starts dying like crazy you kind of have to stop the study.

I love that they waited a good eight years to before they tried it, absolutely tried it again. All right so I'm gonna fire this thing back up. What happened eight years ago? I don't know any of those fools. It's two again. They probably did it wrong. They might did it wrong. We're better at those. Votements can't hurt you. They're good for you. So, and that's what I'm saying.

Like they did all these studies that showed that not only are we not seeing, you know, people avoiding cancer and heart disease and living forever with vitamins, but depending on which study you look at, you saw worse outcomes. And this has not deterred any research. There are still like 2000 studies done a year, or I should say papers published a year.

Who knows how many studies are being done, but there are 2000 published papers a year on vitamin C. That's, if you look at that in American research dollars, that's probably around 60 million dollars. Holy crap. So nobody found any evidence that vitamins are doing any better, but that obviously has not stopped the vitamin train. And what happened with Pauline? Well, Linus Pauline died of prostate cancer in 1994. Well, that is very unfortunate.

I'm sorry to hear that, Linus. But it's really a scientist. I mean, really super, super cool guy. Obviously did many, many great things. And to be fair, he should be remembered for all those other things. Let's focus on those folks. And not the vitamin C so much,

but I think that it really did strike what I would say is, I would say is like an epidemic in this country of vitamin usage. That's like me. I prefer to think of Ginny McCarthy from a work you're on single doubt. I'm a glasses have full kind of guy. But this is a thing. Okay. So I need to ask you what vitamins should people take? Are they? If you take some, you don't get scurvy.

If you take one more than you need, you die of cancer. Here's the thing. There's a thing to remember about vitamins. Okay. Okay, first of all, this does not apply to pregnant women. If you are pregnant, you should take a prenatal vitamin. We have good evidence that shows in pregnancy, taking specifically folic acid,

but all of the things you get in a prenatal vitamin or a good idea. So this does not apply to pregnant women. Everybody else, especially if you live in the U.S. or in another developed country, your diet almost certainly contains all the vitamins you need. Unless you don't eat or you have a very strict diet, you know, say this like some very strict vegans might be in danger of not getting certain vitamins if they don't pay attention to what they're eating. But for the most part, if you don't limit certain parts of your diet, you're just getting all the vitamins you need. It's almost it's almost hard not to. If you ever want to know just take a a look at the back of, like even processed foods like chips and stuff,

and you'll see that there are vitamins and those that you didn't even know you were getting. More than likely, you don't need any vitamins. You see this supplements, I mean, any vitamins, I'll tell you. You see this so much that you almost get, you know, you almost get an air to it, but like, you look at your cereal.

And it says fortified with vitamins. They spray cereal with vitamins. Yes. There are tons of vitamins in your food. A normal balanced diet should supply you with, because remember, one of the definitions of a vitamin is that you only need it and trace amounts. So a normal diet should provide you with all the vitamins you need. Now I will say that vitamin D is a really hot research area right now and this is probably related

to the fact that in order for vitamin D to be active in your body you have to be exposed to sunlight and I don't know maybe it's just evolutionarily we're not spending a lot of time in the sun now especially you know we wear a lot more sunscreen and we try not to go out as much for the fear of skin cancer, which is something we should not ignore. But as a result, we are finding that some people are vitamin D deficient as adults that we didn't previously. But again, unless your doctor tells you

you're deficient and a vitamin, and we can check for the ones that we're worried about, unless we tell you that you're deficient, you don't need to be taking a multivitamin. So there you have it straight from the sister's mouth. Oh, and a B12 shot will not give you energy. It will not unless you are deficient in B12. So don't ask your doctor for a B12 shot. I could ask that all the time.

Specifically if your doctor is sitting there and pleased on it. No, unless you're deficient, it will not help. Thank you so much for listening to deficient, it will not help. Thank you so much for listening to our show, So I want to tell you about something pretty exciting. We're doing a live show in Huntington West, Virginia, our hometown where we live with my brother, my brother, me, the advice show that I do with my brothers,

on December 21st at 7 p.m. It's going to be a who and a half, I think, it's called my brother, my brother and me home with the candlelight holidays spectacular Live from Huntington West Virginia with solbones or featuring solbones one of the two, which would you prefer? I'm gonna be with her featuring I think with featuring sounds like more pressure a lot of pressure We're gonna be doing that at Huntington's city hall We'll be hanging out afterwards and I have a whole list of fun activities to

do in Huntington that you can find on the I remember the main group and I'll put on some of it in the group to if you want but we think it's going to be a lot of fun tickets are going fast. We sold like around 150 today when they went on sale so we're they're going fast you should get them and come to the show. It's going to be great. You can go to MBMBAMCANDILNIGHTS.brownpapertickets.com and that will be where you can get tickets to the show and they're 15 bucks. So come on out. And check out, I think you posted this and maybe Travis did to, there are a lot of cities that are surprisingly close to Huntington, West Virginia. Yeah, Lexington's two hours away, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, you're all three hours away. If you got to four hours, I think

we hit like Pittsburgh and Indianapolis. Yeah, I've driven to a lot of those places to see concerts before. I've driven to DC. Does he concert? That's only five hours, I think. What DC? About six or seven. Okay. Well, you're close. But in the end that address is MBmbcandlenites.brownpapertickets.com. So go get them and come hang out. It'll be fun. Chuck's already got her ticket. Yeah. Anyway, that's we're on the maximum fun network with my brother, my brother and me and a lot of other great shows like destination DIY Baby geniuses stop podcasting yourself bullseye one bad mother my brother my brother and me. I said Well, I mean I said that at the beginning. You already said that I said it like at the beginning

But I appreciate the double plug. I'm always opposed to I know I took that thing. It's your right. It's you They're all at maximum fun. I.org, so go listen to some of their shows, thank you to the taxpayers for the use of their song Medicines, as our opener and our closer, and that's gonna do it for us. Until next time, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And so always don't drill a hole in your head. Head.

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