It’s time to forget about the saying “a vitamin a day keeps cancer away,” as more and more cancer studies show that vitamins are no good in preventing cancer. Two such studies appearing in December 9 Early Release issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) come to underline the idea, saying that vitamins C and E do not appear to reduce the risk of prostate cancer or total cancer in men.

It is a known fact that many people take vitamins in the hopes of preventing chronic diseases such as cancer. Vitamins E and C are among the most common individual supplements, J. Michael Gaziano, MD, MPH, from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School In Boston, Massachusetts and colleagues from the Physicians’ Health Study II wrote in one of the studies, which involved over 14,000 males doctors age 50 or more who were assigned to take vitamin C, vitamin E, both of them or placebos. The participants were followed for a period of eight years on average. During the trial, almost 2,000 men developed prostate cancer, 1000 of them being prostate cancers.

The second study led by Dr. Scott Lippman, from the University of Texas, involved 35,533 men from America, Canada and Puerto Rico who were given either selenium, vitamin E, both or a placebo for between four and seven years. The trial was stopped ahead of its original 12-year deadline because of a lack of any noticeable benefit. The researchers found there were no statistically significant differences in the numbers of men who developed prostate cancer in the four groups. In all cases, the proportion of men developing prostate cancer over a five-year period was 4 to 5 percent. The researchers said their study “has definitely demonstrated that selenium, vitamin E or selenium plus vitamin E did not prevent prostate cancer in the generally healthy, heterogeneous population of men in (the trial).”