Hi my husband and I are both vegetarians and regular readers of your blog.

This article highlights a very important point and one that as individuals interested in the health of our bodies we need to be very aware of. Namely the booming market that natural health and multivitamin products represent. This naturally (pardon the pun) leads to manufacturers that are more interested in the dollars, pounds, euro than health and leads me to ask whether the health problems caused by excessive nutritional supplementation are due to the vitamins / minerals or to the cheap and nasty fillers and non-bio available and cheaper forms that some manufacturers routinely use?

Dr Henry Osiecki published a book called the Nutrient Bible. This goes through all the major nutrients covering the actual active forms of the nutrient and the therapeutic dosage. Invariably we find that supermarket variety multivitamins are next to useless both in terms of form used and dosage. As these represent the majority of the multivitamins consumed it would be somewhat hard for people to obtain "too" much of the vitamin / mineral but very easy for them to obtain "too" much artificial filler, preservative, anti caking agent etc. etc.

For an alternative view, that is not based on theories but on actual results, google the Gerson Institute. In addition to juicing, colonics etc. the Gerson program recommends high dosages of Vitamin C, one of the ones this research alleges may pre-dispose to cancer. The Gerson program talks about using 1 to 1.5grams daily with megadoses of 30-50 grams daily being used intravenously. The thing they stress is the CORRECT form of vitamin C.

High dose Vitamin C and other antioxidant vitamins are spoken about regularly in the literature as being an effective option. It constantly comes back to using the right bio-available forms without the synthetic fillers etc.

Great resource! Keep up the good work!

Marianne. (http://www.passion4health.com.au)

Seems like a choice between two evils then. However I think that when you have a clean body and strong immune system, drinking raw milk is not so dangerous, much like eating raw eggs. Only in a "natural" situation, finding a raw egg might prove less of a problem than milking that wild yak grazing nearby, which entirely proves your point of the "significant risk" of drinking milk from other species ;)

Anyway, my choice would be more like spinach juice, cheers!

This is simply false. The Asian Audit first of all is not a published study. There's no peer review involved, so to put it at the same level as published studies which say the opposite is having very low scientific standards indeed.

The Asian Audit, to the extent that it's accurate, would seem to show a trend that as Eastern (but not African, as you claim) countries shift toward westernized, animal-based diets, their risk of osteoporosis increases. But this is well know, when Asians migrate to the US, they adopt the same risk as everyone here who is eating that diet. It's not genes, it's the animal food, low vitamin D, lack of exercise.

The point Dr. Hyman correctly makes is that increased consumption of animal protein, including from dairy products, leads to increased osteoporosis. I could give you a few dozen cites on that -- which were peer reviewed and published.