I feel more alert when I take a multivitamin. Looking through the food sources of various vitamins, I doubt many vegetarians like myself, or even meat eaters get anywhere near close to 100 % RDA.
Are these daily values too high or low?
Do we feel the benefit, or are vitamins only really useful in preventing disease, like scurvy, that most people don’t suffer from
Vitamins supplements are only required when a deficiency is medically discovered.
If you eat a varied diet you are probably getting more than enough of the daily requirements, averaged over time: even as a vegetarian.
I recently heard a very good radio interview with a renowned local doctor who said that vitamin supplements are a waste of money, again, unless a specific targeted deficiency has been found due to medical problems. It usually won’t harm you to take vitamin supplements, but it won’t do you any good either.
You are feeling the placebo effect.
Nonsense.
If anyone believes this, all you need to do is plug your daily food intake into fitday.com or cronometer.com and see if you meet the USRDA for each of the various nutrients listed. Most people do not.
And that’s just one single nutrient. Chris Masterjohn summarizes some other common nutrient deficiencies here:
Another thing to keep in mind when considering RDA is how you differ from the average. If you’re considerably larger or smaller or active your needs for various vitamins and minerals will be different. I’m very active and so I have difficulty just getting enough calories and protein as it is and my diet isn’t as varied as it should be. I can definitely feel the difference with and without vitamin supplements. However, I could probably address some or all of whatever it’s giving me through other means but it would require a much stricter diet than I’m generally able to maintain, so it’s just not worth it.
Either way, if you want to know if you should take them, you really should consult a doctor.
Right, but is it truly necessary to consume 100% RDA of every vitamin and mineral? Are there health problems from the deficiencies mentioned above?
IIRC, RDA levels are set very conservatively. From a public health perspective, you want to be sure that even old women with intestinal parasites and pregnant with triplets are getting enough nutrients. But those levels are more than enough for most healthy individual.
To be a little more specific, we all know that if you don’t get enough vitamin C you’ll eventually get scurvy. RDA is 90 mg/day. But you actually don’t need anywhere near that much to fend off scurvy – 10 mg is/day enough to entirely prevent and (slowly) cure scurvy. So if someone only gets 50% RDA they’ll probably be completely fine most of the time.
This just goes to show you how incredibly ignorant most MDs are about nutrition in general. Remember, on average doctors have taken than 20 hrs of training in nutrition:
I am not sure that this falsifies this doctors statement about the benefits of supplemental vitamins.
"no evidence to support antioxidant supplements for primary or secondary prevention. Vitamin A, beta-carotene, and vitamin E may increase mortality.”
Studies show that they do not help with:
Cancer:
Cardio:
http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/5/847
Really it seems that popping a pill, while convenient, does not make up for an unhealthy lifestyle.
Google “dr. dworkin multivitamin” and read some of the articles. I can’t quote anything because I’m blocked at work because the website is un-categorized.
Studies show they are no good: placebo effect at best.
Alright guys, don’t let the word get out about this.
These are called anti-vegitable pills. You take them so that it allows you to get out of eating toxic waste vegitables.
There is supposed to be a strike-through for “toxic waste.” I guess strike-throughs don’t work on this board.
If they’re prepared properly, vegetables can, you know, taste good. Except for zucchini, that was designed to look pretty and taste like dirty dishwater.
[del]Strikethrough[/del] doesn’t exist.
I’ll politly disagree, but I don’t want to highjack someone’s thread. I’ve had them preprared every which way to Sunday - no game. Actually zucchini is about the best of the bunch.