Fruits and vegetables also help your body become more alkaline. Doubtful that vitamin supplements could do that.
ConsumerLab tests supplements and vitamins - I have no clue how reliable they are but they seem somewhat legit.
I don’t take vitamins either and I’m middleaged and healthy and my recent physical which included a blood panel indicated no problems. I did try a vitamin B12 shot at a walk-in clinic last year, on a whim, after reading the glowing reports of increased energy and so on. But as far as I could tell, I just wasted $25.00. I didn’t feel any different.
No, anything over “recommended” is not automatically bad, just as anything over 1800 calories a day (or is it 2000? 2500?) is not always bad. The answer is “it depends”. Enough to avoid ricketts or scurvy (Aaarrrr!) is not optimum.to a certain extent, a bit more helps, especially if you have issues - infection, stress, work, different diet - that needs a bit more.
I would be very surprised to find that the content of general multivitamins is not as advertised. That violates a lot of standards in one of the most heavily regulated industries, “things that go in your mouth for $200, Alex”. I would agree that a lot of smaller and “organic” producers are making fairly wild claims and delivering less than promised, especially in herbal products. As anyone who has bought plant product through unofficial channels will attest, the potency can vary greatly and there’s no way to control that; but anyone who thinks chemical A is better than B because it came from a plant plant not a chemical plant,… No. Vitamin C is vitamin C.
So we can talk in circles. My experience is positive, but it’s possible in my bachelor life my diet, as a healthy adult male, was not sufficient. (for the record - before multivitamins, I used to get splitting headaches about every month or two; I used to have 4 or 5 colds each winter. Since I started taking them, I never get headaches and I rarely get more than one cold a winter. I only use the cheap Costco multi’s, about $25 for a years supply. That’s pretty cheap insurance, not expensive pee. And I got those headaches starting in early life, when parents and later uni residence else took care of diet variety)
While the content may or may not be as advertised, the claims that things like vitamin C mega-doses and supplements like acai berries can perform some sort of miraculous cures are outright lies, having no basis in science. By the time a study gets around to proving the uselessness of these sorts of things, the companies that likely started the rumors have made millions from them. A look at the huge vitamin/supplement section of any store with room to have one should clue a reasonable person that something is fishy. Reading the labels on the bottles is like reading a fairy tale; it’s blatant false advertising, yet they get away with it.
Yep.
Well yeah, it’s what I call the oatmeal effect. A study many years ago found that eating oatmeal reduced cholesterol. It’s been sold as this miracle food ever since. Further analysis asked if maybe, perhaps, eating oatmeal instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast reduced cholesterol because of the miracle properties of oatmeal or the substitute effect and filling effect of a relatively plain food.
The same goes for other stuff. Acai, spinach, megadoses of vitamin C, probiotics, etc. A study shows a tiny percentage improvement, possibly valid, possibly not. From then on, that item is sold as a miracle cure, even though if - assuming the effect scaled linear, which biology never does - you would need to consume a truckload of the stuff every day to get a visible effect. (Much like “X causes cancer”, when yes, if you were pumped full of the stuff, your body weight 10 times a day like a lab rat, you have a statistically significant change of getting cancer…)
However, we are discussing plain near-recommended-daily-dose multivitamins, not megadoses. I don’t recall seeing wild and improbable claims by Centrum, but the suggestion that it compensates for shortcomings in your diet is not improbable. That’s the debate, and of course there’s not easy way to prove it outside of a controlled study. However, any controlled study is by definition paying attention to, and likely constructing, the diet of the participants. This wouldn’t settle the question “is a random American’s diet sufficient? More than sufficient?”
As I said, we’re arguing in circles about the issue. For my point of view, worst case I’m suffering from Placebo Effect and wasting $25 a year to make cheap pee. Or, expensive pee if you count Starbucks.
Seems like a rash prognosis. How can the OP be fine missing a significant source of fiber?
Could you expand on this? I know that blood chemistry has a pH level that is tightly controlled regardless of what we eat, but I’ve never heard anything about “the body” as a whole having a pH value.
Yes. Tomatoes, pineapples, oranges and lemons?
I don’t understand why we’re getting off on “If you have a reasonably varied diet in a first-world country. . .”. The OP has stated that there are two entire categories of very important foodstuffs missing from her diet.
Malnutrition? Only if you have symptoms of it, in which case you should definitely see a Doctor. For optimum health you should be taking a multivitamin, a chelated mineral supplement and both soluble and insoluble fiber supplements.
Even then, you are going to be missing out on micronutrients, but you will at least avoid the major illnesses like scurvy.
What about nuts? If you can tolerate whole nuts then a lot of those micronutrients can be supplied that way. . .
Yes, Iron can be a risk for males. But as my links show, Vitamin D shortages are common in America.
The vitamin D recommended amounts were recently increased. Those 60 and over should take a minimum of 1000 I.U.
This link states those over 70 should aim for 800 IU: Vitamin D - Health Professional Fact Sheet That link is 3 years old and more recent literature that I’ve read has upped that.
Vitamin D is safe up to at least 4,000 IU daily and even more if not taken over a prolonged period.
Unless you live in the south, you are unlikely to get enough vitamin D without a supplement.
Yet despite vitamin D being the current best contender for a supplement that may matter the studies that are emerging, taken together, have beennot showingmuch impact of supplementation.
As far as the “oatmeal effect” goes … there is without doubt real positive effect from whole grains, including those with soluble fiber like oatmeal. But the point is still valid: even if oatmeal was neutral and only did good by virtue of what you did not eat because you were eating it instead, that is a good that you do not obtain by eating the crap and then taking a multi and a fiber supplement.
Once again, you are, with the possible exception of vitamin D, highly highly likely getting the vitamins and minerals you need eating a typical crappy American diet. And you are at increaased health risks compared to someone who eats real veggies, fruits, and whole grains instead of some of the crap. And taking a multi does nothing to change those risks for the good.
Your reply is shorter than the original statement that I quoted, and doesn’t even contain a verb. That’s the opposite of “expand”.
Quite a few fruits and vegetables are acidic. I imagine that helps your body become alkaline…
As I said in a previous post - what does the OP replace the missing elements of the diet with, then, to maintain (we hope) the appropriate level of calories and/or bulk? Starches? Fried foods? Starvation? Fish? Red meat? Yogurt? However you re-adjust your food pyramid, if it strays from the alleged “ideal” it can have consequences.
The pH idea is out there because of a sometimes trendy diet fad called “the alkaline diet.” The concept, with very little to nothing behind it, is that excess acid producing foods require the body to buffer the acid and that doing that weakens the bones and a host of other alleged harms. Thus a diet “should” be higher in alkaline producing foods (mostly plant based) and lower in acid producing ones. he decision of whether a food is acid or alkalai producing is based on the pH of its ash. Some believe that they can actually alter the pH in blood or tissues with such foods and that such then has major impacts on health. They are wrong. The using up buffers from bone part at least makes some physiologic sense though - it just ends up not having any apparent actual impact on bone or other health.
Hey, nothing wrong with promoting good basic nutrition … (sorry.)
Another point to make - is timing. While I personally think that multivitamins are useful, that would be as a supplement to an inadequate diet, not a substitute. For simple eating, there are a number of claims around things like “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, blood sugar levels, etc. Binge eating all 2000+ calories in one sitting and having nothing the rest of the day is not the same as spacing your food out over the day. The body will process it differently. The same is likely true of a vitamin pill - relying on a single shot at one time of day to provide all the vitamins and minerals you might be missing is probably not as efficient as consuming some of the required daily dose in other forms through the day. All the multi-vitamin ads I’ve seen tout them as supplements, not substitutes. (As opposed to the fad diets and miracle pills, which are hyped as being part of the second coming).
Thing is, which is better? I read strong and convincing arguments that smaller more frequent meals are healthier, and strong and convincing arguements that intermiitent fasting (including eating one large meal early in the day only as one variation of that theme) is healthier. And of course weak and unconvincing arguments for both as well. Personally I don’t know which one is the more (or less) convincing POV.
While that could conceivably be true, given how complicated biochemistry can be, it’s the exact opposite of what one would naively expect.
Well, considering we evolved as hunter-gatherers, our body processes likely evolved to include frequent small meals over the day, plus the occasional big feast when we killed particularly large game. I doubt that hunter-gatherers made a point of collecting everything and having one big chow-down at the end of the day.
Sorry, forgot the sarcasm quote marks. The original bit was in response to “eating fruit” and getting more alkaline. Many fruits are acidic.