By Jake Foster, PA

In medicine, we try to follow evidence the best we can when we make recommendations for your health. Over the years and decades, there have been countless practice and recommendation changes when evidence becomes stronger or weaker for different things. Where do we get this evidence from? A “gold standard” of research is a study called a meta analysis. The Oxford dictionary defines a meta analysis as an “examination of data from a number of independent studies of the same subject, in order to determine overall trends.”

One such meta-analysis looked at 27 randomized trials that involved more than 170,000 people, and found that deaths from heart attack and stroke can be reduced quite significantly in a 10 year period when cholesterol is lowered using a statin medication. This of course has caveats–and we always try to weigh the benefits of any therapy against the risks it may pose as well.

Recently, researchers from Kaiser-Permanente released a meta analysis of just about every randomized trial of vitamin supplements to date. They found that vitamin supplementation does one thing very well: raise the cost of your pee. Aside from that, there doesn’t seem to be much benefit from taking vitamin supplements, at least from a cancer and heart disease perspective.

The vitamin industry rakes in somewhere in the ballpark of $30 billion a year. This is quite a bit more than the market for statin medications, which is somewhere near $19 billion dollars a year. For sure, both industries are raking in a lot of cash, but it was quite surprising to me to compare the two meta analyses of these therapy options.

This isn’t to say that no one should supplement with vitamins. Expecting or soon to be expecting mothers, as well as people with certain conditions which result in lower levels of certain vitamins do and should supplement with the correct vitamin formulation. And certainly there is low harm in taking most reasonable daily vitamin supplements. Most of us will get the nutrients we need from a well balanced diet. Some of us may need to supplement. The rest of us may just be peeing out a few extra dollars in our urine if we supplement unnecessarily.