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Physicians’ Health Study II found that men who took multivitamins lowered their cancer risk. Dashing the hopes of those who hope to pop a pill to prevent heart disease, doctors announced Monday that daily multivitamins don’t stave off cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks, stroke or death. The findings come from the only large-scale, long-term trial of its kind, called the Physicians’ Health Study II. “Vitamin supplements will never be a substitute for a healthy diet,” says study co-author JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The new study, which followed 14,661 male doctors for more than 11 years, had slightly more positive results for cancer. That part of the study, published last month, found that men who took multivitamins lowered their risk of cancer by 8%. As an industry, dietary supplements have grown from $4 billion a year in 1994 to nearly $24 billion in 2008, according to the editorial. Because regulation of dietary supplements is less strict than for other drugs, makers of these pills are often able to make exaggerated claims about their benefits, with little to no evidence to back them up. Recent studies have largely failed to find much benefit from dietary supplements, however, whether taken as a single vitamin or multivitamin. High doses of vitamin E, vitamin C, betacarotene, selenium and B vitamins all failed to prevent cancer, according to carefully done studies. Studies of high-dose vitamin E have found that it actually increased the risk of stroke and prostate cancer.