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Paul Offit, defender of vaccine safety, has written a new book critical of the alternative medicine industry.

Dr. Paul Offit doesnt like getting threats. But the 62-year-old pediatrician at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia says it goes with the territory when taking on powerful industries and interest groups whose beliefs are deeply rooted in emotion.

Hes ready for a tsunami of criticism with his latest foray into debunking popular wisdom Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine in which he takes on the vitamin and herbal supplements industry, alternative medicine of all kinds, Congress and celebrity doctors who peddle their own products. It hits the shelves on Tuesday.

Yes, I do get hate mail, Offit admits. He makes the case that the vitamin industry in particular has successfully lobbied to keep itself unregulated while selling billions of pills to an eager and gullible public. People think of dietary supplements as natural, benign and helpful, Offit told NBC News. People dont think of them as drugs.

Yet studies have shown that not only do vitamin supplements fail to lower cancer risk, but they can actually cause cancer most notably the 1994 Finnish study that found smokers who took beta carotene which the body converts to vitamin A actually had a higher risk of lung cancer than men who didnt take the supplements. Alternative therapies of all kinds are often not only of no benefit whatsoever -- they can be harmful, he notes.

Offit is best known for taking on vaccine doubters people who worry that vaccinations might somehow harm children and whose fears culminated in a wave of support for the argument that childhood vaccines can cause autism. Offit has received death threats and even not-so-subtle telephone threats against his own children after he challenged these ideas in national media; they worsened when he wrote a book, Autisms False Prophets" that not only systematically took down the arguments but sought to expose some of the powerful money-making interests that were driving a supposed grassroots lobby.

But hes challenging a much bigger group this time. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, more than half of Americans took some sort of dietary supplements in 2003-2006, 40 percent of them multivitamins.

Some are recommended doctors routinely prescribe certain vitamins for pregnant women to prevent birth defects. But too much vitamin A can cause birth defects, so women must be careful. And the Institute of Medicine recently questioned the common practice of prescribing vitamin D for people whose levels are low.

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Vaccine advocate takes on the alternative medicine industry