EATING RIGHT: EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF FOOD AND HEALTH 229part of our nutritional landscape, and the majority of consumers have
been duped into believing that they are buying health. This was the late
Dr. Atkins's formula. He advocated a high-protein, high-fat diet-sacri-
ficing long-term health for short-term gain-and then advocated taking
his supplements to address what he called, in his own words, the "com-
mon dieters' problems" including constipation, sugar cravings, hunger,
fluid retention, fatigue, nervousness and insomnia.l
This strategy of gaining and maintaining health with nutrient supple-
ments, however, started to unravel in 1994-1996 with the large-scale
investigation of the effects of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A)
supplements on lung cancer and other diseases.^2 , 3 After four to eight
years of supplement use, lung cancer had not decreased as expected;
it had increased! No benefit was found from vitamins A and E for the
prevention of heart disease either.
Since then, a large number of additional trials costing hundreds of
millions of dollars have been conducted to determine if vitamins A, C
and E prevent heart disease and cancer. Recently, two major reviews of
these trials were published.^4 , 5 The researchers, in their words, "could
not determine the balance of benefits and harms of routine use of
supplements of vitamins A, C or E; multivitamins with folic acid; or
antioxidant combinations for the prevention of cancer or cardiovascular
disease."4 Indeed, they even recommended against the use of beta-caro-
tene supplements.
It is not that these nutrients aren't important. They are,-but only
when consumed as food, not as supplements. Isolating nutrients and
trying to get benefits equal to those of whole foods reveals an ignorance
of how nutrition operates in the body. A recent special article in the New
York Times^6 documents this failure of nutrient supplements to provide
any proven health benefit. As time passes, I am confident that we will
continue to "discover" that relying on the use of isolated nutrient sup-
plements to maintain health, while consuming the usual Western diet,
is not only a waste of money but is also potentially dangerous.