Vitamin E Slammed In Another Shoddy Story From The New York Times
Well, wouldn’t you know it? Just as I was nearly finished procrastinating, and finally getting down to writing a dry report for a market research firm, one on skin care treatments (insert snoring sound here), but one that actually pays my bills, I had to go for one more spin around the worldwide web.
I checked out the local weather here at home in San Francisco. It is gorgeous, folks, and will stay that way for a while. (I just had to put that in for my poor East Coast friends suffering amid the heat wave). I took a brief tour of the New York Mets homepage and wondered why do I even keep my hopes up about that team and then decided that just a brief glance at the New York Times suffice???, before I would head back to my spread sheets, lickety split, and begin earning the money that keeps me living in America’s most beautiful and most expensive city.
Hmmm, I uttered reading about the plane accident in Toronto, grateful that there didn’t seem to be many, if any casualties when suddenly, calling my name like the Sirens in Homer’s epic poem was a little picture. A small little picture, in a box mid way down on the Times homepage, a photo of some almonds and hazelnuts, just above the words “Vitamin E Fails to Deliver.”
Comparing Vitamin E to “a sort of middle-aged, B-list actor not fulfilling its early promise,” writer Deborah Franklin brings about as much context and thought to her story as the National Enquirer does to it’s regular pieces on the flying half child, half bat they call Bat Boy.
Despite thousands of studies that have shown positive results, the New York Times again delivers a verdict that makes very little sense. It’s as if the Times, upon seeing me eating a taco on Mission Street with Paris Hilton, publishes a story “Hilton to Wed, Older, Jewish San Franciscan Natural Products Guru.”
What’s worse is that Franklin not only manages to dismiss the nearly 23 million (“cardiologists included”, she adds) Americans reported in 2000 that take Vitamin E every day, she implies that they may actually be endangering their health.
Well, Deborah, as a health reporter how about actually doing some reading, getting something, that, in that big white house in Washington, DC, they call edumacation.? Or at least talk to folks who believe that the recent Vitamin E studies fly in the face of everything that has preceded it. Try talking to some doctors, researchers and scientists who must be as raging mad as I am reading your irresponsible story.
And hey, write if you need some suggestions or who to speak with or what to read. I’d be happy to help.
