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C worthy

Vegetarian Times,  Feb, 2004  

The latest study of vitamin C's ability to protect against heart disease in women is not going to make it any easier to make sense of a complicated issue. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found that vitamin C supplements can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease by 27 percent--but that obtaining vitamin C through food has no benefit at all.

That may not be a justifiable conclusion, however, notes Balz Frei, PhD, director of Oregon State University's Linus Pauling Institute. The results of the study, which relied on questionnaires filled out by participants over a 16-year period, may simply reflect the fact that it's easier to remember having taken supplements than to remember exactly what one ate. "Supplemental vitamin C intake may lower your risk of heart disease," Frei concedes in ,an editorial accompanying the report in the July 16, 2003 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, "but it is equally important to eat a healthy diet and lead a healthy lifestyle. Vitamin supplements are no magic bullet and always should be just that--supplements, not substitutes."

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