Healthy eating is not hard. The vitamin sellers try to make it look hard to you so that you take a ‘fallback’.

In contrast, many recent large studies have been showing that taking vitamins actually does not achieve the health effects you would expect and indeed may even do you direct harm, e.g.

Vitamins E and C were ineffective in preventing `cardiovascular disease in men. Sesso HD, Buring JE, Christen WG et al. JAMA, 2008;300 (Physicians’ Health Study II, mong 14,641 male physicians. […] The study participants were randomized to receive 400 IU of vitamin E every other day or a placebo and 500 mg of vitamin C daily or a placebo.

Selenium and vitamin E supplements, taken either alone or together, did not prevent prostate cancer; these results came from initial, independent review of study data from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), funded by the National Cancer Institute. (publication Feb. 1 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.)http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=285

I find your misinterpretation of the points made, and your overreaction very disturbing.

It seems to me that at no point is this post saying that vitamin and mineral supplements aren’t necessary, for some people – yourself being a perfect example – who have deficiencies and health problems caused by them. It is saying that the impartiality of this report should certainly be questioned, especially given the conflict of interest, which we can assume was not stated. And seeing as there are scant details of what research was done, and what steps were made to take into account the failings that LCN pointed out. Those being;

1) declining to mention whether a well balanced diet could supply peoples needed nutrients (if indeed the nutrient levels of the food stuffs has dropped). Therefore resorting to supplements may not be necessary.

2) not taking into account changes in sensitivity and accuracy of analytical chemistry between the two periods that measurements were taken. Therefore the nutrient value may not have dropped at all, or may have have dropped only an insignificant amount.

3) failing to show that any of the 8% of mineral deficient women were made up of those being so due to an alleged reduction in the nutrient value of the food stuffs. Therefore any drop in the nutrient value of food may have little bearing on the health problems of todays population.

Ultimately it is misleading as the vast majority of people would benefit far more, both in the health and their wallets, by consuming a well balanced diet, instead of buying largely unnecessary (as shown by a large number of high quality studies) supplements.

Of course this all comes about as the FSA insist on red-flagging foods solely on the basis of the percentage of a given substance rather than the amount you consume in reasonable portions (they do put the absolute amount per portion on their coloured wheel-of-death, but next to the traffic light colour there’s not much clue as to whether the total amount is significant).

Of course the GDA system (which I greatly prefer) has its problems too, but that’s largely because there is simply no way that a few square centimetres of packet space can convey the complex issues of a healthy diet. Simpistic colour coding is no substitute for people being aware of how to plan a reasonably healthy diet (it’s a truism that there are no unhealthy foods, just unhealthy diets).
It’s also not helped by all the spurious certainty claimed by a lot of the food lobby. The oft quoted stuff about the portions of fruit/vegetable, the units of alcohol and the like are subject to a huge range of uncertainties and variations in individuals.

The Food Commission also appears to invite other groups with agendas to publish articles on their subscription magazine. As an example, authors from the Soil Association who have a habit of mixing up some sensible ideas with a lot of unsupported, messianic stuff more in common with a faith organisation.

From the little I can read on the Food Commission site, then I think this is just yet another self-serving pressure organisation that doesn’t care too much for rigour and the essential uncertainties and has a liking for headlines to capture public interest. After all, they, like anybody else have a living to make and they appear to be funded from subscriptions to their magazine.

Nice work.