Multivitamins could increase the risk of cancer by as much as 30 per cent and should carry a health warning, a doctor from a British charity warns. The controversial suggestion goes against the widely-held belief that taking multivitamins could help boost health by ensuring people receive adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals each day.
Dr Mohammad Muneeb Khan, a National Health Service (NHS) oncologist from the United Kingdom and founder of the UK-based international charity, "Killing Cancer Kindly" (KCK), says that multivitamin products should include labels with tobacco product-style warnings due to the dangers tied to taking certain supplements.
Dr Khan contends that supplements "bombard the body with huge doses of wholly unnecessary nutrients," which may enable cancerous cells to grow and multiply. Natural vitamins found in foods, meanwhile, pose no danger because they are absorbed slowly, and the body takes only what it needs before flushing out the rest.
On the other hand, synthetic pills flood the bloodstream with up to twice the recommended daily dosage of nutrients, becoming a "superfood" for cancers, including prostate cancer, bowel cancer, lung cancer, and breast cancer, according to the doctor. The warnings appear in Dr Khan's new research book "You'll Wish You Were an Elephant (Killing Cancer Kindly)."
"Synthetic pills contain obscenely high and wholly unnecessary volumes of micronutrients that far exceed what the average human body requires," Dr Khan says, according to a statement from SWNS.
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"These tiny organic compounds are so numerous that our organs struggle to use them, and they're left, in effect, to float about the body. The problem is that these excess multivitamins are readily available to feed the hundreds of cancer cells made in our bodies every day. Normally, our body has the capability to destroy these cancer cells effectively, but this becomes a challenge when they are well-fed and able to increase in number quickly," he says.
"Imagine hundreds of ravenous little Pac-Men running around and gobbling everything up and then multiplying in number exponentially over time until they are able to completely overrun our body's anti-cancer defences, such as the immune system. The solution, as controversial as it may at first appear, is to reclassify multivitamins as a drug and make people aware of their side effects. A health warning and prescription would work best alongside the general advice that most people, children and adults alike, do not need additional vitamins in their diet, period."
This is because cancer cells have up to 10 times the capacity of normal healthy cells to absorb nutrients floating around the body - including vitamins.
While other types of nutrients, such as protein, fats, and minerals, also help them to grow, vitamins are, as with normal cells, essential for their survival and reproduction.
Natural vitamins, obtained from "healthy" foods such as fruits and vegetables, do not pose the same dangers because of the relatively small quantities released into the body during the digestion process, the author explains. Unlike their synthetic counterparts, they are "locked away" in the food, with only a fraction being broken down and absorbed before undigested food is excreted - typically within 24 hours.
nnzau@standardmedia.co.ke