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I love it when the cat of controversy gets put among the pigeons of accepted wisdom.

A study conducted by scientists in Denmark reports that vitamin supplements could actually be sending people to an early grave.

To the regular vitamin-popper, this is like learning that going to church is more likely to earn you a place in hell: that your reward for giving up a lifetime of Sunday mornings is to spend all of eternity shoveling coal into the furnaces, motivated by little devils with pointy forks prodding you in the arse.

Vitamins! Yes – those innocuous little plastic containers of pills which provide the A-Z of everything that you didn’t get from your coffee & bagel for breakfast, your Triple Baconater with large fries and 40oz Coke for lunch, and the nachos dripping with radioactive cheese wiz at happy hour (in lieu of dinner).

These boffins at Copenhagen university have concluded that messing around with the body’s chemistry by introducing pills could actually be doing more harm than good. No shit. Free radicals are no longer the enemy, people. Oxidation might actually be a good thing – we might not actually be in need of anything to ‘anti’ it.

Of course, the vitamin folks were straight in there to defend their position: “vitamins can be a useful supplement and [people] should not stop taking them”, says a spokeswoman for the association which is funded by those who sell the supplements. Some wise, unbiased words there – thanks for that.

Like the ‘get-em-hooked-on-tobacco’ and then the ‘get-em-unhooked-from-tobacco’ industries, the vitamin supplement industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar worldwide business to “solve” a “problem” that they most likely brought to the public’s attention to start with.

So, what’s the next big scam? The fruit and veg industry telling us that we need to eat at least six servings of their products every day? Like anyone’s going to fall for that one.