1942

One day near the end of July, as Betty was watching CNN news, I heard her say, "Oh look. There's Bob Kirk!" Sure enough, it was Bob. Seems he was a volunteer in a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center study of the effectiveness of antioxidants in the prevention of colon cancer. The news was that this study apparently showed no significant beneficial effect from ingestion of antioxidants, but the reporter was careful to note that some other studies have shown antioxidants to be effective in this regard.

Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the August 6 Valley News features a full-page spread on this topic, printing a Washington Post article by Richard Weiss. On the conflicting evidence of vitamin research, Weiss writes, '"lt's a complex story,' sighed E. Robert Greenberg, the Dartmouth epidemiologist who led the most recent study of vitamins and colon cancer. 'There are just so many things that we don't understand.'"

Weiss noted that Dr. Greenberg doesn't take vitamin supplements, "but he stops short of recommending against them, counseling instead an even-keeled suspension of judgment." I rather like that concept, but since I have lived with Betty for nearly 50 years and respect her judgment, I have allowed my keel to tilt somewhat toward her opinion but tempered by a compromise: I take one vitamin E capsule every other day.

The deeper lesson of the foregoing is, of course, that in the summer doldrums when none of you writes to me, I have no news to share with you. You can easily avoid a repetition of this column by taking pen in hand and writing to the address below.

56 Cityside Drive, Montpelier, VT 05602