People who take vitamins are careless slobs with delusions of invulnerability.
Pop that multivitamin, and you’ll even be more likely to drink excessively at wild parties and gobble down junk food at buffets.
Nonsense? Of course it is — but that’s the premise of a bizarre new study with the hilarious title, "Ironic Effects of Dietary Supplementation: Illusory Invulnerability Created by Taking Dietary Supplements Licenses Health-risk Behaviors."
As you’ll see in a moment, the only thing "illusory" here is the research itself — because this study involved no actual parties (too bad), no excessive drinking, and no buffet meals.
Heck, no one in this study even took a single supplement — all 82 volunteers actually got a placebo!
Half of them were told it was a placebo… the other half was told it was a vitamin — and researchers claim that afterwards, members of this second group were more likely to tell interviewers that they’d enjoy a wild party or drinking.
Wait, this gets better — after the study, the researchers offered each volunteer a coupon for either an organic meal or a buffet dinner. They say the people who took vitamins were more likely to pick the buffet.
How many of these people actually went to the meals, and what did they eat? Don’t ask — the researchers weren’t interested in the actual behavior… just the distribution of coupons.
In another experiment, the volunteers were asked to bring a pedometer across campus — and those who thought they took a vitamin picked the shorter route.
This is supposed to prove that a multivitamin makes people lazy — but since we don’t know how these people spent the rest of the day, or what walking habits they had before the study, there’s absolutely no way to draw any conclusions here.
It’s the kind of research only a shrink could love — so no surprise it was published in psychology’s favorite bathroom rag, Psychological Science.
Typical.
William Campbell Douglass I.I., M.D. has been called "the conscience of modern medicine."
You can sign up for his "Daily Dose" at DouglassReport.com.
Latest posts by Dr. William Campbell Douglass (see all)
- Federal Fling Triggers Massive Meat Recall - June 13, 2014
- Dutch scientists tell Uncle Sam to pound salt - May 20, 2014
- Zap Your Chicken… and It’s Still Not Safe - January 18, 2013
