Age-old recommendation of taking one aspirin a day revealed as a “medical myth” with zero real benefits

For years, healthy adults have been advised to take a daily aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, cancer and more. But a large, international study has shown that taking aspirin everyday is no way to improve health outcomes in low-risk populations. Indeed, it turns out that people do not, in fact, need to take pharmaceuticals to stay healthy. In fact, a daily aspirin regime actually increases the risk of mortality in other people.

The idea that a healthy person needs to take an over-the-counter pain reliever to preserve their health is truly ludicrous, and it seems the rest of the world is now waking up to the reality that pharmaceuticals are not what makes people “healthy.” Though it’s certainly taken long enough, it seems Big Pharma’s facade is finally beginning to crumble — one pill at a time.

Daily aspirin doesn’t promote good health

New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine has shown that daily aspirin isn’t just unnecessary for healthy people, but that such a regime is potentially hazardous. In the past, it was believed that taking aspirin every day could help reduce the risk of heart attacks, stroke, heart disease and cancer — truly, aspirin has been marketed as a cure-all. But it turns out those “benefits” have been more than a little exaggerated.

Study coauthor Dr. Anne Murray, a geriatrician and epidemiologist at the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute and the University of Minnesota, reportedly stated, “We knew there would an increased risk of bleeding with aspirin, because there has always been. But not only did it not decrease risk of disability or death, it did not decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke, and there was an increase in the rate of death.”

For the study, researchers looked at over 19,000 older adults from the United States and Australia. The participants were then divided into groups: One group was given aspirin, while the other was given a placebo. As NBC News reports, at the study’s end, 90.5 percent of the placebo patients were still alive, compared with 90.3 percent of those who were given aspirin. Across both groups, the incidence of physical disability and dementia were similar, as were the rates of coronary heart disease, heart attacks and strokes.

More harm than good

In other words, the risk of disease remained the same across both groups — but the risk of death was higher in the aspirin-taking group. The aspirin group was also at a much higher risk of suffering a bleeding incident, and they had a higher risk of developing cancer, too. Dr. Murray explained, “There was a small increase in the number of deaths overall in the aspirin group, with the largest proportion of deaths due to cancer. It is possible pre-existing cancers may have interacted with the aspirin.”

One might also question if aspirin causes cancer. Research published earlier in 2018 by scientists from Northwestern University found that daily aspirin was linked to doubling the risk of melanoma in men.

Clearly, daily aspirin doesn’t do much for health. But fortunately, there are still plenty of ways to help preserve and support good health for a lifetime. Eating a diet full of nutrient-rich produce and leading a more active lifestyle are two of the biggest steps you can take to fortify your well-being. Avoiding the pitfalls of the “standard American diet,” like processed foods, toxic food additives and high amounts of sugar, are integral to maintaining good health. Estimates suggest one out of every five deaths can be attributed to poor diet. Who needs to take aspirin, when you can take charge of your own health by simply making different choices?

Learn more about keeping disease at bay naturally at Prevention.news.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalHealth365.com

NBCNews.com

MedicalXpress.com