Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

How many multivitamins do you take every day in the hope that they will make you smarter or healthier, or even prevent some terrible disease? Many people have added multivitamins to their morning routine, but how much actual scientific evidence demonstrates their value?

Not much. In fact, the assertions made by nutritionists often lack scientific rigor, and therefore don’t stand up to scrutiny.

One common theme found in nutritional claims is overextrapolation, when a finding based on a small-scale trial, perhaps in a laboratory, is deemed applicable on a larger scale – e.g., for all humans. For example, the academic nutritionist Patrick Holford, lauded by the press as an “expert,” once claimed that vitamin C is more effective at fighting HIV than AZT, the prescribable anti-HIV drug.

How did he come to this conclusion? He cited a single paper that showed that when some vitamin C was injected into HIV-infected cells in a petri dish, it reduced the levels of HIV replication. The study didn’t even mention AZT, nor had there been human trials!

What’s more, false claims like this one can actually cause treatment to be withheld from sick people. For example, vitamin salesman Matthias Rath helped influence the government of South Africa – where a quarter of the population has HIV – to withhold anti-HIV drugs and promote multivitamins, including his own.

He claimed they would reduce the risk of AIDS by 50 percent, and that they were safer and more effective than any anti-HIV drug, basing his claims on a Harvard study involving a thousand HIV-infected Tanzanian women.

The study showed that low-cost generic vitamins – or a better diet – could be used to push back the start of anti-HIV drug regimens in some patients, but Rath distorted the results, claiming that vitamins were the “superior” cure and even adding that anti-HIV drugs worsened immune deficiencies.

These lies had a human cost: one study estimated that if the South African government had opted to give out anti-HIV drugs during this period instead, they could have prevented 343,000 deaths.