WHAT'S THE TRUTH ABOUT VITAMINS

If you think popping a handful of vitamins each day is the key to staying healthy, well, you might be doing it wrong. 

In fact, your supplements might actually be putting your health at risk: Taking high doses of vitamin B6 and B12 supplements may increase your risk of lung cancer, especially if you smoke or have smoked in the past, a new study in the Journal for Clinical Oncology suggests. Researchers recruited over 77,000 people over age 50, and asked them about how often, how much, and for how long they took vitamin B6, B9 (folic acid), and B12 supplements over the 10-year period leading up to the study. They also quizzed them on whether they were a current smoker, a former smoker who quit within 10 years, a former smoker who quit more than 10 years ago, or a never-smoker. Then, they followed up the participants for an average of about 6 years to see how many developed lung cancer.  The researchers determined that men who currently smoked and reported taking more than 20 milligrams (mg) of vitamin B6 daily during the 10-year period leading up to the study were about three times as likely to develop lung cancer than current smokers who didn't use B6 supplements at all. Guys who quit smoking less than 10 years ago and took more than 20 mg of B6 daily were at greater risk, too: They were 54 percent more likely to develop lung cancer than men who never used B6 and quit smoking within that same time frame. There was an even greater link between B12 supplementation and lung cancer, too. Male smokers who took more than 55 micrograms (ตg) of B12 each day for 10 years were nearly four times as likely to develop lung cancer as smokers who never took B12. As for those who quit smoking more than 10 years prior? They were 89 percent more likely to get lung cancer than those who didn't take B12. The link between B vitamins and lung cancer was only evident in those taken from individual supplementation, not those which were included as part of a multivitamin. And that's likely just because multivitamins generally don't contain high enough dosages of B6 and B12 to pose a risk.