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Jonathan_Graehl comments on Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same - Less Wrong
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Wow, I just read Robin's writeup on this and it caused me to significantly lower the amount of credence I place on his other positions (but very slightly lower my opinion of supplements). It just struck me as overwhelmingly sloppy and rhetorical. Particularly his justification attempt in response to this thread. (But I suppose Robin's responses to criticism have never impressed me anyway.)
Robin generates a lot of clever ideas. That's awesome. I've heard him retract before, but it is tempting to make the minimum feasible patch to your stated ideas when someone exposes some shallowness or flaw in your analysis.
I'm interested in a large single prospective on vitamin supplementation. I can't believe any good will come at looking retrospectively at correlations (I'm too lazy right now to see if that's actually a problem with any of the studies used in the meta-analysis) - people with more health problems (and especially older people) tend to take more vitamins.
Confounding things further but in the opposite direction - people who are health conscious (and wealthier) take more vitamins too.
My approach regarding this topic is that I plan on going and doing/funding research on this kind of thing myself and are actively re-educating myself and acquiring resources in order to do so. In the mean time I'm just not going to take excessive doses of fat soluble vitamins - because that'd just be a stupid idea in the first place!
I'd be extremely grateful if you do investigate this.
See http://phs.bwh.harvard.edu/
Cool. Huge prospective study. They demonstrated that there's no reduction in (several types of) cancer or heart attack mortality with either vit. E or vit. C supplementation (400 IU of vitamin E every other day and 500 mg of vitamin C daily). It's strange to me that they don't look at all-cause mortality.
I think they did look at overall mortality. Quoting from the abstract of the 2008 paper
You're right. I missed it. I know they say it's not significant, but in fact the two P=.15 are weakly convincing to me (95% CI of .97-1.18). The old men are dying off 7% more often if they have the (thought to be reasonable at the beginning of the study) dose of vit C or E (compared to placebo). Redo the study and you'll probably get something like 4-10% instead of 7%. I think this is pretty good evidence for Robin's claim.
This sort of binary treatment-variable study can always be criticized for overly high doseage, as Phil Goetz pointed out. The 400 IU vit E every 2 days is well under the dose already commonly accepted to cause long-term problems (400 IU daily). The 500mg vit. C daily is well above the highest dietary recommendation of 100mg/day, but it's well below the amount some people take.