The Real Story of Risk by Glenn Croston

Author:Glenn Croston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2012-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE

Taking vitamins is another example of risk compensation. We're told that many people do not receive sufficient vitamins and minerals in their diets due to a lack of proper diet, among other reasons. Vitamins do indeed play key roles in the body, and people often have poor diets. And we love the idea that taking a pill or a supplement can quickly fix all that.

There might not be many cases of scurvy (resulting from a vitamin C deficiency) or rickets (caused by a vitamin D deficiency) encountered by doctors today, and goiters caused by a lack of iodine are not commonly seen in the Western world. However, some people do suffer from insufficient vitamin intake. Consider folic acid, a B vitamin. In some pregnant women, lower-than-normal folate levels have been related to birth defects, a situation that is easily resolved by taking prenatal vitamins, which contain folic acid. Along the same lines, adults who get little sun and don't eat dairy products or fatty fish are still at risk of getting too little vitamin D.

One-half of Americans take vitamins and supplements of some sort or another, helping these products to grow into a $27 billion industry.36 And yet, studies to test the health benefits of vitamins and supplements often find little or no impact. While supplement sales have soared in the United States, our overall health has not. One reason might be that most people eating a reasonably healthy diet probably get enough of the nutrients and vitamins they need and don't need the supplements. Another problem might be that, in the real world, we don't keep our diet constant when taking supplements. We risk compensate.

Researchers Wen-Bin Chiou and his colleagues showed this in a study in Taiwan.37 Volunteers were all given a placebo pill (a pill with no active ingredients), but some of the volunteers were told it was a multivitamin tablet that was being studied while others were simply told it was a placebo. Afterward, the volunteers in the study were given surveys to indicate how much they enjoyed either unhealthy activities that produced an easy immediate reward, like sunbathing or going to wild parties, or healthier activities that were not as easy, like running or kayaking. In addition, participants were given a survey to measure their feelings of invulnerability and were provided a coupon to have either a free, healthy, organic lunch or a lunch at the all-you-can-eat buffet, loaded with the less healthy fare toward which we often gravitate.

Sure enough, those who thought they had taken the vitamins had a shift in their preferences, going more for the wild parties and less for running. And rather than going for a healthy, organic lunch, they fell into the gravitational pull of the buffet. Having taken what they thought was a multivitamin, they felt they had filled up on invulnerability in the health bank and could spend some of those health points by slacking off somewhere else.

The volunteers in the study are not the only ones who do this because it's human nature.

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