The bolded part is NOT always true. Approximately 1% of people of Celtic, British, and Scandinavian origin have hemachromatosis, where the body absorbs and hangs onto iron far too well. Untreated, it leads to liver failure, diabetes, heart damage, and various other forms of damage, ultimately fatal. Such people should NOT take any form of iron supplement, and should usually avoid iron-fortified food. Taking an iron supplement will slowly kill these people. 10% of people of that ancestry carry a copy of the gene, and while if they’re healthy they can tolerate normal levels of iron, but if they develop a chronic illness like cirrhosis of the liver or kidney disease they, too, can start to accumulate toxic amounts of iron.
You should only take iron supplements if a doctor determines that you need them. Too much iron can have terrible effects and leave you with an unpleasant chronic illness, perhaps even needing an organ transplant.
Yes, SOME types of micronutrients will be excrete if you consume excess but not all of them will. Some of them will build up over time and can make you sick or kill you. If you have a particular genetic makeup it won’t even take megadoses.
I’m surprised that you are surpised. healthy, active adolescents probably are not affected. Girls that try to eat as little as possible, or any teens with poor dietary habits and no exercise, probably avoid “good” foods like milk, which may be considered a “child’s drink”. No calcium - bad bones.
And oh look, the article recommends dietary supplements.
I agree, at a certian point supplements may be excessive and unnecessary, and even harmful. But if they boost your intake to reconmmended levels and atone for a slightly deficit diet, that’s often better than going without.
Again, though, we’re talking about supplements for someone with a serious problem (like anorexia) or a poor diet very lacking in a particular nutrient, not just “oh, I’ll take this as insurance”.
Yes, MOST of the time multivitamins are a benign placebo, but not always.
The article says “…intake in adolescents is generally…”. I would interpret that as meaning not just those with serious problems. What goes for adolescents probably goes for anyone who does not make an extra effort to ensure a good diet.
Which brings us back to the OP question - “MOST of the time multivitamins are a benign placebo” are you saying:
Vitamins (and minerals) in pill form are not used by the body?
-or-
Vitamins in pill form are unnecessary because you are not short of any those nutrients in your daily diet so as to use the pill’s contents.
The first is obviously untrue because taking an excessiv dose (or in the wrong circumstances, like your iron example) can in fact harm you because the body does acquire the pill contents.
The second is refuted, as an example, by the article’s contention that a significant number of adolescents have a diet deficit in calcium. What else are they missing? What about adults on the same sort of diet? How good does your diet hav to be before you not only do not have obvious deficiency diseases but are consuming what should be your recommended intake?
To be fair - I really don’t care, I started taking the mulitvitamin as an insurance, I’ve found it realtively beneficial, but I probably have an inadequate diet. I’m fairly overweight, I’m not a health nut, and I don’t think a pill comes close to being the salvation of all health issues. I just assume the insurance value of ensuring I have close to adequate amounts of whatever I might otherwise be missing is probably worth the minor cost. If this were one of those health nut solutions like organic St Johns Wort (whatever that is) and costing dollars per dose, fuggedaboudit.
Less than recommended intake is not equal to osteoporosis. Not optimizing bone health is not osteoporosis.
Too much iron btw is pretty easy to do and there is some thought that it is a significant contributor to health problems in America today.
Supplementing folate also comes with potential risks.
If you do a multi stay away from one with iron unless you are menstrating woman and probably even then. You do not need more folate and might be gaining some risk by taking a multi with one. And unless you have a specific medical issue like malabsorption, or are on a highly restricitve diet, you are highly highly likely getting enough vitamins and minerals without it. Getting enough of all the other stuff in real vegetables and fruits and whole grains? Probably not. But nothing fixes that other than eating some of those real foods. Seriously. If can be arsed to take a multi you can be arsed to not subsist on crap alone.
Oh, a bit more about teens and calcium. Adequate calcium intake is important and should be encouraged but truth be told is oversold. The major predictor of adult bone health, i.e. good bone mineral density or BMD, is not teen calcium intake but adequate exercise.
I see clinical osteoprorosis defined as bone density 2.5 std deviations below healthy adult. Yet the article suggests that “teens generally” are less than optimum in calcium intake. (Those at the more extreme end of calcium shortage are at risk of easy fractures, even if not at the same degree as an elderly person). the article makes the point that optimum bone development takes place as a teen and young adult, so failing to reach maximum at this point puts you at further risk down the road.
And of course, if I’d get off my duff and exercise, and eat more steamed veggies and less fried chicken, I’d probably be healthier too. At least I don’t smoke or drink.
i don’t claim it’s a replacement, but unless I’m killing myself with excessive overdoses, it’s better than doing nothing. after all, if I’m below minimum recommended daily requirements, it must help somewhat.
Again, there is little evidence that it is better than doing nothing and some evidence that it could be doing harm. If nothing else the false sense it gives that you are actually doing some good is doing harm if it makes even one small percent more likely to continue to sit on your duff, eat less real veggies (frozen, canned, are fine … need not be steamed), then it is doing real harm.
And since the teen calcium additional info was lost to you in crosspost I will post another more recent replication:
Please note 500 mg/d is less than the recommended 1200 mg/d and yet was not associated with later risk down the road; exercise (or lack of) was. Extra calcium also did not decrease it. There is no substitute for getting off your duff, or eating well.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting eating mass quantities of anything. What has been stated is that eating even a small amount of said healthful foods (along with whatever you want) should negate the need for the multi, and that the multi may be doing more harm that good.
At least that is what I am getting from the discussion here.
Multi and whatever you want (assuming you are talking about the standard American crap, processed foods, etc.) is about the same thing (plus minus risk of taking the multi, especially if it contains iron) as whatever you want without the multi. Choose the option if you want. You are more likely to die of cancer, have heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cognitive decline, substantially earlier than if you ate a modest amount of vegetables, fruits and whole grains … especially if you get off your duff too.
Taking a multi can allow you to delude yourself into thinking you’ve done something healthy. But you have not.
OTOH eat modest quantities of vegetables, fruits and whole grains and you gain those benefits.
Eat mass amounts? Maybe a bit better. Minimally you are more likely to be eating less of the harmful crap. That is an independent plus. The greater fiber likely also good. Top limit to benefits from the antioxidants, phytochemicals and stuff? Don’t know but I’d suspect minimally diminishing returns, likely some ceiling, and maybe there could be too much of a good thing from dietary sources too. “Mass amounts” … sounds like it is getting into fad diet range and I’d lean away from that.
That’s $200US per year. Jeez Louise. If Multi-Vs cost that much, I say forget about them. I had in mind $17US for 500 tablets. Even then, daily use turns out to be somewhat dubious.
Thanks for the calcium update. I guess my 3 bottles purchased of the stuff over the course of a lifetime were of marginal benefit. Ah well. One thing good about calcium supplements is that they come in horse pills. And one pill daily gives you about 30% of RDA. So the chance of ODing are lower.
I disagree that popping a multi is equivalent in effort to exercising 3 times a week and eating lots of fruits and vegetables. What the public wants is cheap and easy ways to stuff your face and stay healthy. Personally I go for fou-fou carrots, but methinks we could use some more options. /rant
But MfM even you are going with the false dichotomy. Not subsisting on crap alone does not require exercising 3 times a week and eating lots of fruits and vegetables. Mind you that is better but the most beautiful thing about adding some healthy choices is that the biggest gains are made with the initial smaller changes. Any activity HUGE compared to inactivity. More better but less big of gains. Some veggie and fruit instead of some processed crap than none. Moderate amount, that half of every plate bit, better yet, and seriously not very much effort.
Oh thank you! Yeah I was figuring out one day how to make a thread, and I accidentally made a nutrition thread into a different one:smack: I didn’t know how to change it, so I just left it…sorry. **BTW, how do you make a thread for a specific topic of interest? **
Well, there’s no question that if the rest of your diet leaves you deficient in some vitamin or mineral, a plain old One-A-Day or Centrum tablet can keep you from getting a vitamin deficiency disease.
But it’s very hard to come by a diet that’s so low in any one vitamin or mineral as to actually create a deficiency. Even eating Big Macs and fries every day will cover most of the bases.
Personally, I do take a daily multivitamin-and-mineral supplement because I hate vegetables:
They’re generic Wal*Mart vitamins, and cost me about $20-30 per year.
If you are eating well and are healthy, your body will absorb all it needs from your food. But if you are diabetic or have renal or gastric disease, your body will not absorb all the nutrients it needs from food alone. Malabsorption can lead to deficiency even if the nutrient intake is normal.
I suffered from severe B12 and folate deficiency despite eating a normal diet. My doc explained later that diabetes causes systemic malabsorption, particularly of B family vitamins and folate. I bought a bottle of Sundown mega-dose B vitamins; it was worth its weight in gold.
There are some nutrients you will completely miss if you do not eat/like certain foods. Example, your body needs omega-3s (DHA and EPA) for vital functions but you only get them in some fish. This is an example of a nutrient most people can only access in the bottled form. You probably can never be certain if you are getting any of the trace micronutrients from your food alone. I argue that multivitamins are certainly cost-effective in the long term.
Well, sure, but that’s yet another case of a doctor diagnosing a problem, not a normal, healthy person taking multivitamins on their own guess.
>sigh<
Where do you get that it’s only available in fish? Clear marketing by supplement makers? Yes, certain types of fish are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids but they are also available in kiwi fruit, various seeds like flax, chia, and hemp and their oils, raspberries, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, eggs (especially if the chickens are feed on greens and insects), grass-fed meat animals (they get it from the grass), and mammal brains and eyeballs (admittedly, not the most popular food items in the US but popular other places).
Unless, of course, you’re one of those people for whom multivitamins pose a risk by upping your levels of iron or something else to damaging levels. For just hemachromatosis that’s probably around 3,000,000 in the US.