Kentucky environmental attorney Sanders says Bayer sued over false claims that Mens’ One-A-Day vitamins can reduce prostate cancer risks.

A consumer advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against Bayer AG for allegedly making false claims that Men’s One-A-Day multivitamins can help reduce the risk of prostate cancer.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) filed the complaint in the Superior Court of California, hoping to force the company to recall multivitamin packages and alter advertisements that claim the selenium in Men’s One-A-Day can help prevent prostate cancer.

Prior to filing the lawsuit, CSPI contacted Bayer and requested the company remove its selenium claims after two recent studies found that selenium provides no prostate cancer prevention benefits, and also suggested that men who took selenium may face an increased risk of diabetes.

One of the studies was a prostate cancer prevention trial, called the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The SELECT study found that selenium provided no more prostate cancer prevention benefits than a placebo. Another study found that men taking selenium had triple the risk of having diabetes.

SELECT was a 35,000-patient trial that found that neither selenium nor vitamin E, taken alone or together, prevented prostate cancer after 5 years of use, as reported by Medscape Oncology. In October 2008, the trial’s Data and Safety Monitoring Committee made the decision to stop the use of the supplements.