“Just because you are on a statin does not necessarily mean you should take a coenzyme Q10 supplement.”
“If you are worried that your coenzyme Q10 level is low, you can have it checked with a blood test at your doctor’s office. If it is lower than normal, then you may first want to consider making changes to your diet. For most people, eating at least five fruits and vegetables a day, fish two to three times a week, and nuts two to three times a week keeps their coenzyme Q10 level normal, even if they are taking a statin.”
I changed my life with exercise but the diet is still pretty bad. I’m not proud of it, it could be far worse but it is not going to give me all I need nutrition wise.
Is there any value in vitamin supplements under this reality that I share with millions?
How are you sure you are not getting the nutrition you need? I think you will find that the western diet, even what one would consider a poor American diet based on fast food, will provide you with everything you need, nutrition wise. Unless you are female and in the process of creating a child, there is likely no benefit at all to taking vitamin supplements.
There are not the recommended serves of fruit and veg, little to no fish etc. every cite says eat a good diet with XY and Z and you don’t need this stuff, they never say what to do if the diet isn’t good.
If my diet is good enough they should lower the recommendations. Nobody should be surprised supplement business is so huge with the message you don’t need them if you eat right. Swallowing a pill is much easier.
You are not wrong. But, the default position probably should be that you are likely OK without supplementary vitamins, even if you are not following the recommended servings of everything, not what the vitamin advertisements are suggesting.
But it isn’t the vitamin ads, take the article posted above from hopkinsmedical
“I don’t recommend other supplements,” Appel says. “If you follow a healthy diet, you can get all of the vitamins and minerals you need from food.”
All the medical and gov sources prescribe diet over pills, fair enough but if that diet isn’t happening? They leave a gap, they need to explain better because it reads like you don’t need vitamins unless you don’t follow a healthy diet (by their definition) and millions of us don’t so do we need pills?
There are few supplements more beneficial than a well-balanced diet, eating smaller portions less often of the foods you already know perfectly well are less nutritious, eating more vegetables and fibre and sleeping well. Eating fatty fish more often is tastier and more helpful than supplementation. (An extremely healthy diet requires eating healthy for eighty to ninety percent of meals and snacks and does not necessarily require removal of all tempting foods.)
I do take a few things for specific reasons. I am not convinced the evidence shows they are very helpful, or would help everyone, or even do not cause harm - and so I do not recommend them to most other people. The evidence is not there to do so.
IANAD, but unless you are showing signs and conditions of malnutrition, it’s unlikely you are missing anything, vitamin-wise, by not eating a healthy diet. You may be doing yourself other harm by having too much fat and salt and not enough fiber, etc., but I think it’s unlikely you will have a deficiency requiring use of a multi-vitamin.
And that may well be absolutely true but isn’t what any reputable cite says. You don’t need supplements if you have a healthy diet. They never allow or provide information for the middle ground a whole lot of us fall in to. If you want to kill off Big Supplement you need to get them to change the messaging.
fTR I don’t take multis but I can certainly understand why many feel the need, they know their diet isn’t great so assume a benefit.
In January of this year, I started having issues with weird feelings of faintness/anxiety, along with shortness of breath and skipped heartbeats. My GP was stumped, and a cardiologist found nothing wrong after running a battery of tests.
A couple of months later, I was still having issues. For some reason, I thought to look up side effects of the one or two supplements I was taking. One supplement was potassium, which I started taking because I was having issues with muscle cramps and I couldn’t tolerate Gatoraid or other drinks because of all the citric acid in them.
I looked at Mayo Clinic’s list of side effects for potassium, and there they were: unexplained anxiety, shortness of breath, heart palpitations. I chucked the potassium and the symptoms immediately went away. I’ll stick to bananas from now on, thanks.
And melatonin didn’t keep me asleep, but it did give me vivid and unsettling dreams. No thanks to that, either.
Oh, yeah, and the fish oil that my ophthalmologist recommended because I have dry eye gave me the most godawful acid reflux I’ve ever had. I’d wake up choking on stomach acid in the back of my throat. The doc will have to come up with something else.
Wasn’t it here that I saw a similar discussion earlier this year?
If not, here’s the gist of what I read somewhere else:
By no small coincidence, the 1980’s saw the Food and Drug Administration relieved of the responsibility of (or authority to) oversee the area of dietary supplements. By not small coincidence, the pseudo-health supplement areas of commerce subsequently exploded, along with homeopathic and holistic “medicine” section of of health food stores. By officially saying the US government would not regulate or enforce or police the industry, they basically opened the landscape for every snake-oil hawker to sell whatever garbage they could invent and make million$ with little to no proof that their product did anything helpful - so long as the products weren’t harmful. Only later did the government get itself involved more heavily by insisting the herb & supplement industry couldn’t make unproven claims – and that was more about keeping in line with Consumer Product issues (the Department of Commerce) than about keeping anyone safe or healthy. So now the pseudo-health industry rakes in the dough with acai berry extract and aromatherapy kits at psychic faires and nobody can complain until AFTER a few dozen cases of harm can be clearly traced back to a particular product. The hucksters will claim their pill has seen a AA percent improvement in BB percent of the people who use it but if you’ve been taking it and seeing no improvement at all, well, your body chemistry just happens to be like the (100-BB) percent of people who didn’t see benefits. Sorry, don’t buy any more; we won’t miss you because there will be dozens of others who will start buying our magic syrup after you stop. We’ll keep getting rich without you.
TLDR: Pharmaceutical science started out as herbal shamanism and has grown up. In modern times, biochemists isolate active ingredients and run zillions of thorough exhaustive tests in order to develop medicines that treat specific problems. Your average doctor has to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the uses, side-effects, side-benefits, and problematic interactions of thousands of drugs – in addition to understanding the causes and treatments of all sorts of human maladies. Self-diagnosing and ‘supplementing’ the drugs prescribed for you can throw a wrench into your doctor’s efforts to treat you.
–G!
There was another couple of threads around here, before I wandered away, that discussed vitamins. Several people posted things like “I take 'em; I figure it can’t hurt” and several of our medically-trained dopers posted things like “Actually, if you’re taking Vitamin ____ and you don’t need it, here’s what kind of harm you can do to yourself…” and, even back then, our own Dopers kept clinging to their ignorance. I suspect this thread will end in similar ashes.
Taking vitamin and antioxidant supplements as a substitute for eating an adequate diet with lots of fruits and vegetables means you’ll miss out on a lot of beneficial natural phytochemicals that aren’t in those pills.
One excuse for pill-taking that’s often heard is the claim that modern fruit and vegetable hybrids aren’t as nutritious as they used to be. There’s some evidence to support that - but you can make up for any lost nutrients by simply eating modestly larger portions of those fruits and vegetables.
It’s important to realize that while the typical person can achieve a healthy diet from just food, not everyone is typical. As people get older some find it difficult to absorb B vitamins from food because of a lack of intrinsic factor, causing pernicious anemia.
Some people, like me, are frequent blood donors. Year to date I’ve donated 3 units of red blood cells, 2 units of plasma, and 20 units of platelets. That’s pretty atypical, and my iron supplementation routine keeps my hemoglobin up, although my routine would possibly be dangerous to someone without my Red Cross Blood donation center schedule.
I’ve only got one eye that works, and the health of my remaining eye is pretty important. Based on some retinal drusen my retina guy found he put me on an AREDS 2 supplement for Age Related Macular Disease.
Supplements aren’t without side effects, regardless of what some hucksters say. If it doesn’t have side effects, it’s because it doesn’t have any effects. There’s a whole list of people who shouldn’t take the eye supplements I use, including:people with all of these conditions:
glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency
a high amount of oxalic acid in urine
iron metabolism disorder causing increased iron storage
sickle cell anemia
calcium oxalate kidney stones
decreased kidney function
anemia from pyruvate kinase and G6PD deficiencies
decreased blood-clotting from low vitamin K
increased risk of bleeding due to clotting disorder
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t take supplements just because, don’t take supplements if you have any contraindications, and if you take supplements take the right dosage on the right schedule.
Eat more computers & fancy smartphones!
TL;DR: Health supplements are one of the most profitable scams around. May I just remember supplements are the main source for Alex Jones’ fortune? What, in your case it is different? Yes, of course, it always is.
Not for everyone, again, the aging population loses intrinsic factor necessary to convert B12 to a form that can be absorbed in the intestines. These people may require supplementation, and saying that people don’t need supplements because there are foods that B12 fortified foods that have the supplements baked right in is just supplements with extra steps.“You don’t have to take supplements, you just have to eat this food that someone else put a supplement in.”:
If you recall, I posted “Supplements may not be necessary”.
And again, foods fortified with B12 (such as fruit juices, yogurt, some breakfast cereals etc.) are likely to have other important nutrients that are not found in pill bottles.
