Taking daily vitamin supplements doesn't help you live longer, may shorten your life
A bit of a chicken and egg problem here. Once again we have to look at who took something and why. Rather obviously: people who were concerned with their healh -- sick people in an extreme. So pill-taking could be an index of poor health rather than poor health being caused by pill-taking.
What happens when generally healthy people take a small amount just as a precaution -- as I do? The amount taken and the reasons for it clearly need to be sorted out before we can draw useful conclusions
And it seems possible that supplements might contribute to well-being, even without a mortality reduction. Let me give an example: I am prone to leg cramps. If take magnesium tablets they go away. If I stop taking them the cramps come back. The pills are unlikely to make me live longer but they make my life better. That probably follows wherever there is a deficiency problem.
And deficiencies might not always be obvious. It was, for instance, only a blood-test that revealed that I had a vitamin D deficiency. It can led to brittle bones, which is a horror. Did I have brittle bones? I don't know. And I don't want to find out. So I now take a supplement that has brought me up to par
They promise health benefits from boosting the immune system to strong bones.
But multivitamins do not help you live longer, a major study has found.
Regularly taking the supplements was found to have no effect on whether people lived longer, according to the research involving nearly 400,000 healthy adults.
In fact, using multivitamins daily was associated with a 4 per cent higher mortality risk, the analysis found.
The vitamins industry is estimated to be worth billions in the UK and US, taken by people in the hope of improving their health.
But the potential benefits and harms of supplementing diet with additional vitamins and minerals remains unclear, often hindered by study size and short follow-up times.
Led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute in the US, researchers followed participants with an average age of 61, who had no history of cancer or other chronic disease, for more than 20 years.
They looked at their multivitamin use from 1993 to 2001 and again between 1998 and 2004 with a follow up period of up to 27 years.
During this time, some 164,762 people died, with 49,836 deaths attributed to cancer, 35,060 to heart diseases, and 9,275 attributed to cerebrovascular diseases.
Researchers assessed for other factors such as education level, whether they were ever smokers, body-mass-index, marital status, alcohol and coffee intake.
They also looked for family history of cancer and factored this into the findings, according to the research published in JAMA.
Those who used multivitamins were also more likely to use individual supplements and have lower BMI and better diet quality.
But there were no longevity benefits found in those who took daily vitamins – in contrast, they were linked to a 4 per cent heightened risk of death.
It concludes: ‘The analysis showed that people who took daily multivitamins did not have a lower risk of death from any cause than people who took no multivitamins.
‘There were also no differences in mortality from cancer, heart disease, or cerebrovascular diseases.’
But the results do not necessarily mean that taking vitamins is a waste of time.
Research published earlier this year by Harvard University finding they can help slow the cognitive deterioration that occurs with age.
Other research has suggested they can help people to feel healthier, although it could be the placebo effect.
Duane Mellor, a registered dietitian and senior lecturer at Aston medical school, said: ‘It’s not surprising to see these do not significantly reduce the risk of mortality.
‘A vitamin and mineral supplement will not fix an unhealthy diet on its own, but it can help cover key nutrients if someone is struggling to get them from food.
‘An example of this might be vitamin D where adults in the UK are encouraged to take as a supplement in winter or vegans and vegetarians who might benefit from a supplement of vitamin B12.’
Writing in a linked commentary, Neal Barnard, Hana Kahleova and Roxanne Becker, of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, said: ‘Refocusing nutrition interventions on food, rather than supplements, may provide the mortality benefits that multivitamins cannot deliver.
‘Vegetables, fruits, legumes and cereal grains are staples in areas of remarkable longevity, known as Blue Zones—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; the island of Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.’
They suggested that some vitamins in the supplements may have an impact on other drugs being taken, for example vitamin K may reduce the efficacy of the anticoagulant warfarin.
And the inclusion of iron in a supplement adds to that in foods, increasing the risk of iron overload, which is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, the commentary continued.
The experts also said similar concerns may apply to copper supplementation, and calcium and zinc may reduce the absorption of certain antibiotics
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Endangering Israel’s Security—and Our Own
While Israel works to fend off terrorists, the Biden administration is withholding both intelligence and military aid—placing a key ally in jeopardy and putting America’s own national security at risk.
The administration is refusing to share valuable information regarding Hamas with Israeli intelligence until Israel halts its Rafah offensive—a decision that follows close on the heels of the administration’s announcement that it would halt weapon shipments to Israel. Yet these appalling decisions are only the most recent in a long string of poor policy choices.
So how did all this start?
Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration lacked any sort of realistic perception of the situation in the Middle East. Mere days before the attacks, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, “The [Middle East] region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
This misperception led the Biden administration to divert critical assets away from terrorist groups like Hamas—ultimately leading to the failure to anticipate or disrupt the events of Oct. 7. In November, senior administration officials admitted that, following 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies almost completely stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups, believing that Hamas constituted no direct threat to the U.S.
Indeed, Washington deprioritized the Middle East as a whole. After the Biden administration’s takeover, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to reduce the number of civilian intelligence analysts tasked with monitoring the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides testified that this deprioritization of the Middle East had left the U.S. vulnerable and unable to anticipate the attacks.
The Biden administration also spent significant resources in a misguided attempt to appease Iran—a policy that directly led to the Hamas attacks and regional escalation. Less than a month before the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration announced it would issue a waiver giving Iran access to $6 billion that had been previously blocked by U.S. sanctions.
By unfreezing Iranian assets, the administration presented the world’s largest state sponsor of terror with unprecedented resources, allowing it to direct, fund, arm, and train Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the myriads of other terror groups currently attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. This both enabled Oct. 7 and allowed for increased attacks from groups like the Houthis, an Iranian-armed terrorist group that has been disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, causing shipping delays and increased costs to ordinary consumers.
The Biden administration also provided U.S. adversaries with valuable resources in the form of international aid. For example, the administration reversed Trump’s funding cuts and restored more than $200M in aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization with direct ties to Hamas—as demonstrated by the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the Oct. 7 attacks and kidnappings.
President Biden’s approach to national security poses a stark contrast to that of President Trump. Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s foreign policies, opting to alienate Israel and appease Iran—a policy that has endangered both the U.S. and its allies.
Absent aggressive congressional oversight to assess the Biden administration’s intelligence priorities—and to investigate its handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the recent decision to withhold information and weapons from Israel—the situation will only get worse. Failure to accept responsibility for the national security malpractice—as demonstrated in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict—will create present and serious consequences for Americans.
Under the Biden administration, rising foreign instability and conflict escalation have become routine. America needs to change course immediately and return to policies that foster peace and stability—both abroad and at home.
https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/endangering-israels-security-and-our-own
***************************************************Biden’s Public Health Assault on 2A rights
By Rick Manning
President Joe Biden’s Surgeon General has declared gun violence a health care emergency in a new report issued just in time for the presidential debate.
How dare he?
I’m sorry, but a president and political party that has opened the border to gangs, rapists, drug cartels and human traffickers doesn’t have the moral authority to say anything about law abiding citizens right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves and their families from those violent thugs.
A president and political party that elects prosecutors who fail to prosecute both property crimes and violent criminals simply doesn’t get to sanctimoniously issue a report based upon diagnosing bullet holes and not the hands that pulled the trigger to create them.
A president and political party that defunds and demoralizes the police in many of our major cities making them little more than clean-up crews rather than active interdictors against violent crime have forfeited any credibility in commenting on the crime and squalor that result.
Finally, a president and political party which oversees and benefits from a failed, teacher union dominated public education system where kids are deliberately left behind to suffer under both the tyranny of low expectations and dilapidated schools run by gangs where drugs and violence are the norm, have no business telling those who survive that system that they are what’s wrong and their rights should be shattered.
Yet, it is the pattern of the left in America to break things and then propose solutions that give more power to the government while deconstructing individual rights – all for a good cause of course.
Not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s chief health politician failed to even consider any of these actual causes of violent crime. Instead, the ‘reports’ Table of Contents read like a gun ban seminar.
You have the debunked international comparisons, disproportionate impacts, racial inequities as all included along with some crime data and a section of the effects of gun violence. The 32 page pamphlet seeks solemn legitimacy through its Ivy Tower approved language without even attempting to engage in anything resembling serious, rigorous, unbiased academic review.
Not one section is devoted to the impact of the open border and the failure to deport illegal alien criminals, the ending of broken windows policing on increased violent crime, the disparate impact of failure to prosecute criminals on community violence, the emasculation of many big city police forces or the correlation between failed schools and increased crime.
Imagine that, a bunch of politically motivated public health foofs have created a report on gun violence without bothering to look at actual root causes.
What a shock! Not. The very people who couldn’t figure out that a coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, the home of the Wuhan Institute for Coronavirus Research, likely came from that lab and not some once in a hundred years bat/pangolin virus mutation, are now seeking to drive health care edicts on gun violence without looking at any of the actual causes of criminal behavior.
But the potential impact of this unserious report cannot be taken lightly. The Biden administration continues to try to subject the American health care system to the whims of the Chinese government World Health Organization. The WHO has already declared private gun ownership to be the enemy of world health.
The other reason to take it serious is that Covid proved that due to the regulations, insurance repayment mechanisms and health reporting systems put in place by Obamacare, the federal government health care bureaucrats have extraordinary power to mandate medical procedures and standard questions all the way to the local doctor’s office.
Every time a person gets asked about ‘guns in the home’ by their doctor or nurse it is likely to be recorded into the cloud, creating an accessible, sortable database of gun owners in America, in direct contravention of law.
Because of this, Biden Surgeon General Vivek Murphy’s laughably political report is actually nothing to laugh about. What the left have failed to do legislatively or through the Courts, they are trying to accomplish through the administrative state under the guise of public health. After the past four years, liberty loving Americans should shudder at this very notion.
Barack Obama once said, ‘elections have consequences’ when dismissing concerns that his policies went too far. This report is just one more bit of evidence that the left will use every bit of power they are allowed to hold in the pursuit of growing government power and diminishing the power of the people.
Elections do have consequences and November is coming. Consider your choices carefully and vote for freedom. Remember a failure to vote for a candidate who can win is effectively an abdication of this right to others.
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Here’s the Truth About the ‘Pay Your Fair Share’ Malarkey
Given Leftist dishonesty on the matter,this needs to be repeated often
Politicians on the Left portray the rich in America as a bunch of freeloaders who don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
These politicians suggest that many of society’s problems could be solved if only the rich would be less greedy and hand over more of their money to the government to spend.
There are three problems with this argument.
* First, many of society’s problems are caused by the government spending too much—inflation is a prime example.
* Second, the argument ignores the greed of the politicians who want to spend other people’s money.
* Third—and this is the crux of the matter—the rich already pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes.
In 2024, about 1 out of 180 American taxpayers will make $1 million or more of total income, based on a broad definition of income used by the forecasters.
Altogether, these million-dollar earners will earn about 15% of the nation’s income next year. But they will pay 39% of all federal income taxes.
The million-dollar earners will pay an average federal income tax rate that is 3.5 times higher than the other 99.4% of Americans.
Politicians also peddle the claim that millionaires and billionaires pay a lower tax rate than schoolteachers, nurses, firefighters, sanitation workers, or whatever group they’re pandering to on that particular day.
President Joe Biden has even suggested that millionaires pay not only a lower rate, but “less in taxes” than these other Americans.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Based on the government forecasters’ estimates, those earning a million dollars or more in 2024 will pay an average of about $776,800 in federal income taxes, about 475 times as much as the average American taking home between $50,000 and $100,000.
As a percentage of income, it’s somewhat more even. But still, for every dollar of income, the millionaire category will fork over more than 10 times as much in federal income taxes as their middle-income compatriots.
However you look at it, the rich directly pay a huge share of federal income taxes.
But for politicians who routinely propose trillion-dollar increases in federal spending, the higher priority seems to be convincing voters that somebody else can and should pay for their spending sprees. After all, if every household paid an equal share of taxes, each household would be on the hook for more than $7,500 in additional taxes for each trillion dollars of new federal spending.
The “pay your fair share” malarkey is a diversion meant to distract Americans from seeing just how big of a share the federal government is taking out of the economy.
America’s economic malaise isn’t a consequence of the rich being allowed to keep too much of the money they earn, it’s a consequence of the federal government draining massive amounts of resources out of the private economy by spending about $7 trillion a year—more than $50,000 per American household.
America’s economic troubles are multiplied by the federal government’s regulating businesses to death and by the Federal Reserve’s inflating away the purchasing power of each dollar by printing more and more money to buy up federal debt.
The inflation that comes with a bloated federal government is a hidden tax that hits all Americans, but that doesn’t show up in tax distribution charts.
And that brings us to another Biden claim: that those making less than $400,000 won’t pay a penny more in federal taxes under his policies.
In fact, Biden has implemented and proposed numerous tax increases that would directly hit middle-income Americans. But none of them has hit as hard as the hidden and indirect tax known as inflation that followed Biden’s runaway spending.
And this is a critical point. Tax distribution charts show that the rich pay a disproportionate amount of federal taxes, but they don’t show how much of the economic fallout of excess taxes and spending ultimately lands on the middle class.
When excess federal spending and taxes drive up businesses’ costs and force business owners to raise their prices, nurses and schoolteachers must pay more for their groceries, rent, and gas.
When high taxes lead a manufacturer to eliminate bonuses, cut benefits, or move jobs overseas, workers pay the price.
When high taxes discourage entrepreneurship and stifle innovation, firefighters, sanitation workers, and everyone else who would have benefited from better, more affordable products suffer.
These downstream effects on the middle class don’t show up in tax distribution charts, but they’re no less real than the taxes that come out of Americans’ paychecks.
If the solution to what ails the middle class was more government and high taxes on high-income Americans, then Americans would be sitting pretty right now.
But if that’s not working for everyday Americans—and there’s every indication that it’s not—maybe it’s time to make the federal government tighten its belt for a change.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/26/heres-the-truth-about-the-pay-your-fair-share-malarkey/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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