• Raise The Alarm: Mothers-To-Be Should/Shouldn’t Take Multivitamins During Pregnancy

    Posted January 26, 2014: by Bill Sardi

    The current ongoing anti-vitamin supplement campaign being played out in the news media will go to no end to misleadingly scare the public away from vitamin pills.  This time it’s multivitamins during pregnancy.

    In what amounts to a lot of double talk, investigators and news reporters alike issue warnings and then disclaimers that make one wonder if there was anything to be alarmed about in the first place.

    The Daily Mail in the UK issues a headline report that says “Taking multivitamins can raise risk of a miscarriage,” and claims “32 per cent are more likely to lose their baby early-on if they had taken the supplements,” but end their report by saying “in the meantime, supplements should be taken in accordance with current clinical guidelines.”

    Researchers said: “We found a modest but consistent increased risk of early fetal death in multivitamin users.”  The reported increased risk was 32% but that is a relative number, not a hard number.  In reality, less than 1 in 100 were at risk for a miscarriage who took multivitamins.

    A chart that marked the progress of the study involving 35,000 mothers shows that early-on multivitamins slightly increased risk for miscarriage, then weeks later reduced risk by what ends up to be a minute advantage for multivitamin users versus non-users.  It was a null study and the results were far from being consistent.

    A lead investigator “urged women not to panic.”  But the only panic that would have been created would be by the researchers themselves and the non-critical news reporters who failed to see the obvious – there was no bottom line increased risk.  It was a statistical but not a clinical increase in risk, and only early in the study.

    Out of one hundred mothers-to-be you couldn’t tell them even one would be at increased risk for a miscarriage by taking multivitamins.  The authors of the study concede they were not able to determine any reason for a slightly increased number of miscarriages among multivitamin users.

    This scare tactic may result in mothers backing away from using multivitamins that could result in more birth defects (cleft palates).

    The study was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

    Chart: multivitamins in pregnancy

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