I take a centrum multivitamin every day and I hardly ever eat any fruits or vegetables. Is a multivitamin enough, or do I probably have malnutrition and not even know it?
You probably aren’t suffering from malnutrition, but if you are seriously concerned you should consult your doctor. I think the biggest thing you may be missing from not eating fruits and veggies is fiber, which is important for cleaning out the colon etc.
A multivitamin should not be considered a substitute for food, but as insurance. I also take Centrum daily, but I also make sure I eat my fruits and veggies.
Long term I don’t think multivitamins are a good substitute. As noted, no fiber. That may work fine up until your 30s or 40s and beyond, b t after that? Diverticulosis for one thing.
And I’m not going to get into the woo that is micronutrients, but you’ll never convince me that little processed pellets of stuff probably manufactured in China are an adequate replacement for real fruits and vegetables. Besides which, eating fresh foods is tasty. 
Micronutrients certainly exist, but there’s little solid evidence how critical they are. However, why gamble?
Fiber is the biggie, and many fiber supplements only have one type.
Find one or two fruits or veggies you like, and eat them often. Find one superfood you don’t hate, and eat it once a week. Myself that’s broccoli.
One worry - which hasn’t been mentioned yet - is that most vitamin intakes don’t just have a lower bound, they also have an upper bound. Going below the lower bound causes malnutrition and causes problems for you in the order of months. Going above the upper bound seems to be linked to increased likelihood of cancer, heart disease, etc.; things which shave a few years off your life expectancy, but where there’s no immediate effect and it’s impossible to prove in any individual case how much of an effect there was.
Basically, you should either keep track of the nutrition labels for a week - during which you eat normally - to see whether you’re meeting the recommended intake levels before taking multivitamins, and then taking targeted vitamins for the areas where you are lacking (or changing your diet). Or - perhaps better - eat normal for a week and then ask your doctor to run a blood test and tell you where you’re lacking.
Available evidence suggests a diet rich in fruits and vegetables enhances health and longevity. Much of this effect may be due to ingredients not found in vitamin/supplement pills.
For example, there’s been a lot of hype about benefits of moderate wine drinking, which supplement hucksters and some scientists have attributed to resveratrol content. Increasingly, new studies are finding other phytonutrients in grapes/wine that may be beneficial and are not found in resveratrol supplements.*
*Most if not all such supplements get their resveratrol from the giant knotweed plant, not grapes or wine.
As an arm chair nutritionist (this stems from a long history of powerlifting and later dieting to get rid of excess fat) I wouldn’t but a huge amount of stock into most nutritional concepts you hear about unless you’ve got a mountain of evidence to support it.
Some things for which I know this exists:
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Eating a good amount of protein has a lot of health benefits. This is especially true for senior citizens.
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Whey protein is the King of proteins. Nothing else compares, you can get everything somewhere else but whey is King.
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Taking a few grams of creatine a day is basically also good for everyone. There’s no one who shouldn’t be doing this.
There’s a few other things, but those are some of the basic ones.
In weight lifting communities, people who just refuse to eat green vegetables (and they exist) are generally advised to do one of two things:
- Take a multivitamin and supplement fiber and spirulina.
- Drinking juices made 100% from fruits/vegetables. An example might be some of the Bolthouse Farm fruit/vegetable juice mixes, or carrot juice, or home made vegetable juice. This is probably as good as it gets for people that just refuse to eat green veggies, because almost anyone can eat these juices. The problem with the commercial juices is they are typically a high ratio of fruit:vegetable and so you get a mountain of sugar. This may or may not be bad, but it’s worth mentioning unless you’re getting the stuff that basically actually tastes like liquid vegetables it’s probably mostly fruit juice and very full of sugar (but again, that’s not necessarily bad.)
A daily multivitamin pill is not going to take anyone eating a remotely normal diet (whether at the “healthy” or “unhealthy” end of the spectrum) anywhere near the “upper bound” for any vitamin. Yes, it is possible to overdose on some (not all) vitamins, sometimes with very nasty consequences, but it takes a real dedicated effort of idiocy to do it.
You’re fine.
Micronutrients certainly exist. Some micronutrients are essential, in that you’ll get very sick or die, fairly quickly, if you don’t get enough of them. We call these essential micronutrients “vitamins”, they’re easy to identify, and your little pill will contain as much of them as you need.
But there are probably also a number of other micronutrients, which aren’t exactly essential, but which are still generally good for you in some way or another. Some of these, we’ve identified, and your pill might contain those, too. I really wouldn’t want to assume that we’ve identified all of them, though, so it’s a really good idea to eat a wide variety of foods, which will probably get you most of the micronutrients you would want, even the ones we haven’t yet identified.
Oh, and the fiber thing, and the quality of life thing: Properly-prepared veggies taste good, and if you don’t eat them, you’re missing out.
Have you tried vegetable powders (which can be mixed in milk like protein powder) or freshly made vegetable juice? Those are a little easier to consume than vegetables for those who do not like eating them.
There are a variety of healthful parts of fruits and vegetables.
Vitamins & minerals
phytochemicals, antioxidants, etc
soluble and insoluble fiber
water
A multivitamin will only provide the vitamins and minerals, and it may provide lower quality ones (bioavailibility of vitamins varies, and the cheapest ones sometimes are not that good at being absorbed. Most store bought vitamins tend to be the cheapest formulation).
I have a bottle of some generic standard 1-a-day vitamin/mineral tablets, the kind that has 100% of almost every known nutrient from A to Z.
I take one half of one tablet a day.
I assume that my culinary habits are more or less adequate, and that I’m getting approximately everything I need from my diet. The daily half tab is just to make sure. I figure that will fill in any gaps in my nutrition, without any risk of going overboard on anything, and without being too redundant and wasteful.
I wonder if I am about right in all that. Any Doper knowledge or opinions about that?
Everything I’ve read about multivitamins indicates if you live in a first world country and have a varied diet typical of people who live in such countries you probably derive no benefit from the multivitamin, at least as far as anyone can tell. If you have some weird dietary hang ups and only eat a very select list of foods or something, the multivitamin may help.
“May”, meaning in theory it’s going to give you the micronutrients and vitamins you aren’t getting because of your weird diet. I don’t think there’s been any science showing that just because selenium is in a capsule it isn’t absorbed into the body.
But, a nice balanced diet gives your body the macronutrients, vitamins and micronutrients it needs repeatedly throughout the day so that it always has access to them. To compare it to a concept from powerlifting, once you lift weights your body starts a process of muscle repair and adaptation that can last (roughly) from 48-72 hours (novices go through this process faster.) During this process, protein (and other things) being made available through the diet help the body optimize the growth of muscle. So how often should you be eating protein after lifting weights? Well, basically at every meal. Ideally every 4-5 hours or so. There are people who think they can pound a post-workout protein shake and be good to go.
I wouldn’t be shocked that micronutrients work the same way, if they’re good for bodily processes that means it’s probably nice to have them coming in regularly, not just once a day in one big dose, in which it’s quite possible the body can’t utilize the entire dose.
A recent thread where several dopers make the case that multivitamins are a waste of money, and are probably doing more harm than good. The point being that even a crappy diet has enough of what you need, except in rare cases.
Anecdotally, I work with pharmacists and none of them accept that multivitamins do any good at all, unless you are facing an unusual health issue.
There’s a range between “minimum necessary”, “optimum”, and maximum useable". While analogies are not always useful, think of vitamins as like lawn fertilizer. Grass will usually grow OK without fertilizer, but grows faster and thicker with fertilizer, and too much can kill a lawn; and without the right amounts of other inputs - sun, water, good temperature - fertilizer doesn’t work either.
Same with the body, and with many other biological processes. You can have sufficient nutrients to stay healthy, yet not be optimum. Depending on the situation, you may need more or less of various nutrients. The 26 (or 58, or whatever) vitamins and minerals may not be everything your body needs, so going without other possible foods simply for personal preference or eccentricity is not the best strategy.
Biological processes are remarkably adaptive. We can consume our vitamin D or make it ourselves. Our body can in some ways process protein, fat, or carbs into different forms to compensate for a deficiency elsewhere.
Whether you’re missing something -good question. This is probably the best point:
The trouble is, nobody knows for sure what level of selectivity crosses the line into “weird” or “not varied”. There’s only one way to tell for sure. There are a lot of people wandering the first world like tired zombies; whether from stress, poor sleep, undiagnosed illness, or malnutrition - or more likely, a combination of several causes. At least taking vitamins helps cut down on possible causes; as does eating varied foods, exercise, sunlight, etc.
The other issue is - ok, no fruits or veggies; what do you replace it with? More meat? Baked potato? Potato chips (crisps)? Do you want fries with that? Even eating less than the optimum number of calories has implications for body processes.
So skip vegetables, take a vitamin instead; drink glasses of Metamucil if you don’t like veggie drinks, etc. Then, if you feel like crap after a few years, think about a better diet. And as mentioned, some things, like skipping fibre intake, have no repercussions until decades down the line, if at all.
Not necessarily. Seniors often need some extra vitamins, women other, pregnant & lactating even more, smokers need others, etc.
http://www.uspharmacist.com/content/d/senior%20care/c/21981/
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/72/1/280s.full
So, yeah if you’re a healthy adult male who doesn’t smoke, get exercise and eats right, your multivites likely are useless.
Overdosing and overdoing are different.
If you look at the minimum, recommended, and maximum values for vitamin intake, they’re usually something like:
Zero--------------------Min–Rec------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Max
There’s very little room between the minimum and the recommended and a lot between recommended and the max.
While it’s almost certain that the exact placement of “recommended” is still pending a lot of further science, let’s pretend that they’re correct. If they’re correct and that’s the optimum dosage, then to extend your lifespan as long as possible you need to consider every tiny niblet of distance that you move past Rec towards Max is bad. Not “unhealthy” per se, but not optimal.
Since there’s pretty small wiggle room between optimal and minimum, if you’re not already achieving the optimum, you’re probably going to hit the min and feel sick/unhealthy. If you don’t feel that way, then you’re probably hitting the optimum already and adding an extra 50% or 100% of your daily requirements is just pushing away from optimum.
Multi-vitamins are, by and large, a billion dollar scam in a first-world country. They often don’t contain the nutrients claimed on the labels and, as far as I know, the FDA doesn’t require testing. They are absolutely NOT a substitute for the roughage contained in fruits and veggies. I don’t take them, and haven’t for a very long time. My blood work is just fine, thanks.
Previous thread about multi being at best a waste of money for almost all.
Short version: the crappy Standard American Diet usually still has enough of the basic vitamins and minerals and there is even some (albeit small) risk associated with going over some with multis (iron and folate in particular); the other goods that come with actual diets high in real vegetables and fruits (decreased risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, and early cognitive decline) are not accomplished by taking the multis … Is it other stuff in real veggies and fruits that is not in the multis or something about how the complete package delivers things? Dunno. But multis don’t do it and real veggies and fruits do.
You don’t likely have malnutrition with or without the multi and your long term health *and *aging would likely go a lot better with moderate amounts of real vegetables and fruits.