As retailers, you surely face customers concerned about the latest study reported in the news media. To consumers, it must seem like a nutrient is a champion of health one day, and a lethal monster the next.

Case in point: the heralded and popular Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has just published results of an analysis of two trials on B vitamins and cancer risk, concluding increased folic acid intake of folic acid (B9) and vitamin B12 is associated with “increased cancer outcomes and all-cause mortality in patients with ischemic heart disease in Norway, where there is no folic acid fortification of foods.” In various news outlets, such as U.S. News and World Report, HealthDay, Reuters and ABC News, the researchers suggested the results could indicate fortification of foods with folic acid may not be as safe or healthy as originally thought.

This isn’t the first recent study to suggest a link between folic acid fortification and cancer—a European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology report in Spring 2009 linked the vitamin to colon cancer, and even similar prior results from the Jean Mayer USDA lab at Tufts University, Boston, were tempered by those researchers as not conclusively proving folic acid fortification causes increased cancer (See more on that here). In fact, a Harvard School of Public Health doctor suggested increased cancer rates around and since the time of mandatory folic acid fortification in the United States and Canada in 1998 may well be attributed to an increase in colonoscopy procedures—you probe more, you find more.

Further, with the deluge of condemning headlines on the current folic acid results, the nutrition industry is quick to point out some important, overlooked aspects of the JAMA review. Andrew Shao, Ph.D., vice president, scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), noted perhaps the biggest smoking gun of the JAMA report: the study found 94 percent of the subjects who developed lung cancer were either current or former smokers. Hmmm, so smoking causes cancer?!? No way. Regardless of the fact, as Shao pointed out, the long history of epidemiological study on folic acid indicates the opposite of what the JAMA report concludes. So much for totality of evidence when deciding on fortification regulations that may affect birth defects in women. Not that cancer is small potatoes, but the link has not been conclusively established.

Daniel Fabricant, Ph.D., vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Natural Products Association (NPA), made some additional good points about the JAMA review report, which looked at the NORVIT (Norwegian Vitamin Trial) and WENBIT (Western Norway B Vitamin Intervention Trial): “Previous review has indicated the NORVIT might not have been adequately powered and the factorial design might have been too complex, thus rendering the trial incapable of isolating the effect of folate per se,” he noted. “Being combined with the WENBIT, which was terminated early, and which wasn’t without its design flaws, either, creates a scenario in which two flawed studies are combined to yield one larger flawed study. This does not seem to be in the best interest of medical science or public health.” 

Now if customers come in concerned about this latest trial generating negative news, you have the talking points to help them better frame the research and understand the big picture. This is not to say fortification is good or bad, but to say B vitamins don’t cause cancer, smoking does.

-Steve