The politics of vitamins.

There is no doubt that anything done in excess usually causes more harm than good. An interesting piece has emerged from Lewis Fein on the latest Johns Hopkins study on Vitamin E.

According to this questionable study, taking too much Vitamin E may be problematic. Well there's a surprise. I'd say that it is a good rule of thumb that taking too much of anything could be problematic whether it is Tylenol or martinis.

The underlying dismay for Mr. Fein, however, seems to be that more and more reputable institutions -- truly gold standard operations -- are falling prey to questionable reporting. Whether it is CBS News or Johns Hopkins, it seems that there is less objectivity and more "wishful thinking."

With CBS News, the production team that worked on the infamous national guard memos story wanted the bottom line result to be the unvarnished truth so badly that they were willing to "fill in the blanks" to make the puzzle pieces fit just so. So what, then, is the motivation behind a Johns Hopkins to publish such a questionable study?

Could be a combination of trial lawyers and the subsequent defensive medicine policies we seem to endure more and more lately. What concerns me, though is that it could signal a much more ominous storm brewing. With Michael Moore running pell mell after pharmaceutical executives, cameras rolling, more and more drugs being pulled off the shelves and rumblings on op-ed pages, it seems that the medical/pharmaceutical profession is in the crosshairs much as
the tobacco companies were.

Pretty much whatever industry the right gets a check from, the left is going to call into question or wage an all-out jihad to defund the entity entirely.

So whether it is Vioxx, Celebrex or Vitamin E, I think there are lots of scare tactics going on that have more to do with the industry than the science.