Question about vitamin pills

For a long time I have heard various people say that it is much better to get your vitamins from fruits and vegetables then from multi-vitamins. I also recently caught part of a news story saying that some study concluded that multi-vitamins were essentially useless.
Can someone explain why? Apart from the fact that vegetables have fiber, what makes getting the same amount of vitamins from them so vastly superior?

I think the jury’s still out on this one. My understanding of the argument is that pills don’t break down in the right way during digestion to actually deliver the vitamins to your body. You mostly piss them all out. I think fiber supplements have similar issues.

I’m not a doctor, nor do I really know what I’m talking about, but it’s what I heard and I thought I’d give this thread a little bump. I’m curious what the experts have to say myself.

By eating a varied, healthful diet, one ensures getting plenty of vitamins and minerals from their food-sources; thereby eliminating the need for a multivitamin supplement. This is the preferred method to vitamin pills and supplements for a couple of reasons. One, it encourages a healthy, well-rounded diet. When a person relies on a vitamin supplement, often times they let their dietary habits slack off under the mistaken belief that the multivitamin will “pick up the slack”. Two, vitamins and minerals are meant to be micronutrients found in one’s food. So they are absorbed and utilized much more completely and effectively when ingested as part of a foodstuff. As a “second-best” option, it is often advised to take a multivitamin with food, in order to mimic this process.

It probably is better to get all the nutrients you need from food, but that’s mainly because we really are in the dark ages still in terms of being able to even identify what nutrients we need.

But it’s one thing to say you’ll eat a healthy diet and another to do it. It’s not so much discipline either as it is weighing the calories you unavoidably have to consume to get enough of the few things we actually have minimum standards for.

Take magnesium for example. If you look at the list of foods that have a high concentration, many are very high in calories. Beyond that, just to get the daily value of several hundred milligrams, you have to consume a fairly decent volume - with or without any calories.

The same is true for other things like potassium and possibly copper. And those are just minerals. Once you get into areas were no DV has been established, things get even fuzzier.

Pissing a particular vitamin out isn’t necessarily a criticism of taking them via pill instead of food. You piss out any extra B vitamins or vitamin C regardless of how you take them in, as they’re water soluble.

The packaging.

I know that sounds trite but it is not. We don’t completely know what it is about the packaging that matters, but we do know that it is the package that counts. It could be the wide variety of other phytochemicals and micronutrients, such as a wide variety of what get called antioxidants, that add up, absorbed with the vitamins, to have the most beneficial effects, or it could be something about what they refer to as “the matrix” of the food that impacts the health outcomes, or … others, both?

dzero, magnesium? 1 oz of almonds, that’s about 15 to 20 almonds at a mere 164 Cal, gives 20% of your daily magnesium RDA right there. Other high sources are dark green veggies and many fruits. One cup of cooked spinach, at 41 Cal, gives 157 mg, almost 40% of RDA, on its own.

The point in fact is exactly that by eating a wide variety of real foods that are naturally high in vitamins you will, without having to think about it, get a diet more than adequate in a host of minerals, phytochemicals, and so on, and those foods are both usually not very calorie dense yet are often high in fiber so tend to satisfy hunger longer. Consequently you are less likely to eat as much of foods that are associated with adverse health outcomes. The vitamin content of the foods may not be the most important thing itself, but using that as a guide will lead to an overall diet that is likely to lead to good helath outcomes.

Sorry for the double post - haven’t been around for a while and forgot about the 5min limit.

Table 1: Selected food sources of magnesium [5]

Food Milligrams (mg) %DV*

Halibut, cooked, 3 ounces 90 20
Almonds, dry roasted, 1 ounce 80 20
Cashews, dry roasted, 1 ounce 75 20
Soybeans, mature, cooked, ½ cup 75 20
Spinach, frozen, cooked, ½ cup 75 20
Nuts, mixed, dry roasted, 1 ounce 65 15
Cereal, shredded wheat, 2 rectangular biscuits 55 15
Oatmeal, instant, fortified, prepared w/ water, 1 cu 55 15
Potato, baked w/ skin, 1 medium 50 15
Peanuts, dry roasted, 1 ounce 50 15
Peanut butter, smooth, 2 Tablespoons 50 15
Wheat Bran, crude, 2 Tablespoons 45 10
Blackeyed Peas, cooked, ½ cup 45 10
Yogurt, plain, skim milk, 8 fluid ounces 45 10
Bran Flakes, ½ cup 40 10
Vegetarian Baked Beans, ½ cup 40 10
Rice, brown, long-grained, cooked, ½ cup 40 10
Lentils, mature seeds, cooked, ½ cup 35 8
Avocado, California, ½ cup pureed 35 8
Kidney Beans, canned, ½ cup 35 8
Pinto Beans, cooked, ½ cup 35 8
Wheat Germ, crude, 2 Tablespoons 35 8
Chocolate milk, 1 cup 33 8
Banana, raw, 1 medium 30 8
Milk Chocolate candy bar, 1.5 ounce bar 28 8
Milk, reduced fat (2%) or fat free, 1 cup 27 8
Bread, whole wheat, commercially prepared, 1 slice 25 6
Raisins, seedless, ½ cup packed 25 6
Whole Milk, 1 cup 24 6
Chocolate Pudding, 4 ounce ready-to-eat portion 24 6

not great, but a little better. :slight_smile:

Yes, that cite does say what I just said. High sources includes foods like halibut, almonds, soybeans, spinach … not many so “very high in calories” That 3 oz serving of halibut has a mere 120 Cal and 23 grams of protein. Serve up a 6 oz piece and you get 240 cal giving you 40% of RDA for magnesium.

I know I usedd to get splitting headaches about once every month or two. Since I started taking a multivitamin (at first, Centrum - now the Costco knock-off) around age 35, the headaches have stopped. It’s been about 20 years and I can’t remember the last time I had one. I used to get 4 or 5 colds a winter including extreme sore throat and stuffed nose for up to a week, now I occasionally will get 1.

My theory is that the pill will provide some of what your body needs. However, in its concentrated form, you may not absorb it all in the time it is passing through, you also may even have consumed far more than what you need; the unused portion will come out as “expensive pee”; but you are further ahead than if you did nothing, despite the negative ramblings of health nuts and Sheldon Cooper.

There is likely a group that wants to believe that if it’s not pure, it’s not good. (I think it’s the modern version of the Puritan ethic, that if it was enjoyable it must be bad) Therefore, store-bought vitamins are no good. Fresh fruit or vegetables are no good unless they’re organic. Meat is bad because it’s not free-range. In fact though, all that stuff is better than no stuff, and you can actually live on it.

md2000, it is wonderful that you are doing so well while using supplemental vitamins, but it is not just fictional nerds and health nuts that question whether or not supplemental vitamins are more good than harm. The number of studies that show benefit are few while many, including large meta-analyses, have shown either no benefit or oddly higher cancer risks with multivitamin use even though diets of real foods that are high in vitamins are clearly associated with less risks and better health outcomes. And, BTW, frozen and canned veggies count just fine from the health POV.

Saying that vitamins in pill form “don’t break down all the way during digestion” and therefore you just piss them away is a contradictory statement.

What doesn’t break down during digestion is excreted from the body via fecal matter. In order to “piss away” excess vitamins, the stuff has to be absorbed during digestion and reach the bloodstream. From there, the unused portion is filtered out by the kidneys, and therefore “pissed away.”
~VOW

Beyond vitamin deficiencies, what we know of further vitamin benefits mostly come from comparing populations with various diets. Such studies indicate eating a varied diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables is healthful. A popular interpretation of that is that fruits and vegetables give us vitamins and fibre, and that’s true, and nothing else important, and that appears to be false.

Vitamin supplements will help you stave off those particular deficiencies, but they won’t give you the overall benefits of a varied diet containing all the other stuff that we don’t know about yet. And they may even be detrimental to your health as indicated by several studies. One in Finland on possible effects on cancer risk from vitamin A supplements was stopped halfway through when early results showed an increased risk of cancer instead of the decrease the researchers were expecting.

So if you’re at risk for scurvy and beri-beri, by all means get vitamin C and A supplements, just don’t think they’re as beneficial as eating oranges and carrots.

There is a huge amount of evidence that proves even subclinical deficiencies in Vitamin D can cause or contribute to a host of problems. This is not subject to debate. I you read the article and check the sources you will see why.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/332009/title/The_power_of_D_

Of course in the case of D, you simply have to spend more time in the sun. But what if that’s not an option? And if we are just finding all of these things out about the importance of Vitamin D, then why shouldn’t we at least be open to the possibility that it may apply to other substances as well? It is a valid working thesis if nothing else.

Not subject to debate? Did you read your own cite?

We might all benefit a lot from more vitamin D, I for one try to catch a little more sun and buy D-fortified milk, but promising results have vanished in more rigorous trials before and may do so here as well.

This was an issue for me after my mini gastric bypass. We can eat less, so we have to make the most of the littel volume we can eat. US Doctor Rutledge is an expert on all things mini gastric bypass, and he has made a series of short YouTube clips where he explains common questions his patients have. In this cliphe talks about the use of multivitamins and how they do, or do not compensate for healty food.

Which is why I am horribly B12 deficient despite consuming more B12-rich meat than the average person.

Heck, the reason I’m on oral B12 is that it’s been shown to be, in sufficiently high does, just as effective as shots.

I hate, Hate claims that eating vitamin rich foods is always enough.

It would appear that you didn’t manage to get past the third paragraph of that 12 page article. That’s too bad.

dzero, the evidence that for vitamin D supplementation in the context of inadequate sun exposure (which is often the case for many adults in much of the Western world especially those with other than pale complexion), may be very strong, but that article certainly is not enough to declare that there is no room for debate. There is huge debate over how much is needed and if routine supplementation is worthwhile or not and that article references that debate. In fact the consensus right now is against routine extra pills of vitamin D. Perhaps subject to revision as more data comes in. That you do not see that even just from that article is … too bad.

BigT, I of course have no knowledge of what is really going on with you, but in generally someone even mentioning B12 shots as an option is one of the big warning signs that you may be dealing with a quack.

No one in this thread, including me, is claiming that diet is “always” enough. Some people have odd unusual conditions. Maybe you are one of them. But getting vitamins from diet is always preferred over supplementation. A varied diet of foods high in a wide variety of vitamins will be associated with much better outcomes than supplementing the same vitamins by the same amount and will, with rare rare exceptions, be enough.

Technically, everything is subject to debate. If you choose to be overly literal in your reading of my posts, there’s not much I can do about that.