Multivitamins may not be of any use to cigarettes smokers

Smokers who take multivitamins while puffing many cigarettes daily should beware: there is no evidence that the pills will protect them against cancer.

This has been revealed by Wen-Bin Chiou of the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan who led a study.

In the first of two experiments, 74 daily smokers were given a placebo (not an actual medicine) but half were told they had taken Vitamin C supplement, the journal Addiction reports.

Those who thought they had taken vitamin smoked almost twice as much as those who knew they had taken a placebo. They reported greater feelings of invulnerability.

The second experiment was an expanded version of the first, with 80 participants taken from a larger community.

Smokers who thought they had taken a multivitamin again smoked more than the other group.

But this time, researchers found that the amount of extra smoking rose if the smoker expressed a conscious belief that multivitamins increased health.