Should Men Be Taking Men's Supplements?

Goes for women, too.

False claims:

"In recent years, both research on and the availability of vitamin supplements has increased, drawing increased attention to the possibility that a daily pill can enhance health.

In particular, it is a message that is resounding with men. According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition, 53 percent of American adults take a multivitamin supplements, and 50 percent of adult men 18 and older take a multivitamin, according to a 2008 survey.

But preliminary encouraging findings can often hit a wall when they are refuted by larger studies that lead to increased scrutiny on products whose claims overstated the benefits of that early research.

The latest product to enter the crosshairs of a watchdog group is Bayer's One A Day Men's Health Formula supplements, which are promoted as containing 'Selenium to support a healthy prostate.'

Those claims came under fire from the watchdog group the Center for Science in the Public Interest after two studies on selenium came out in June in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, one of which showed selenium provided no benefit and one which showed that for men with a certain gene variant -- one found in three quarters of men -- selenium supplements made the prostate cancer worse.

The authors of the second study, from the University of California, San Francisco, concluded that their findings 'indicate caution against broad use of selenium supplementation for men with prostate cancer.'

CSPI released a statement earlier this week in conjunction with a complaint to the Food and Drug Administration.

'Bayer must be stopped from promoting its selenium-containing products as a means of reducing prostate cancer risk and promoting prostate health,' senior nutritionist David Schardt said in the statement. 'Not only does selenium not prevent cancer, supplementation with selenium may be harmful.'

Schardt told ABC News that other supplements have similar problems, such as supplements that contain gingko, whose claims for increasing memory and concentration have not been confirmed by studies.

At this point, he said, the very notion of a men's supplement is faulty."

Useless products:

"A similar dearth of evidence can also be found in a more popular pill -- the daily multivitamin supplements that provide one day's serving of vitamins.

'It is the most popular dietary supplement,' Council for Responsible Nutrition spokeswoman Judy Blatman said.

But while the pills may be popular, the benefits of taking them remain largely unproven...

'...where multivitamins have been put to test in a clinical trial to date. None have really shown benefits for any clinical outcome like cancer or heart disease,' said Ross L. Prentice, a biostatistician with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington who has been involved in some long-term studies of the effects of multivitamins on the risk of disease.

'I think it's a large, expensive industry without convincing data. Billions of dollars in expensive urine so far,' he said."

Diagreement not possible.

And a formula for business success in land where a sucker is born every minute.