I have a history of a blood clot and of heart disease on one side of my family, and my doctors are all okay with a daily 81mg tablet of aspirin.
I’m on the fence with other supplements. I take niacin and garlic caps figuring that at least they won’t hurt, and that there may be some actual benefits. You can find arguments either way, so it seems to me that it’s really a crap shot as to whether or not it helps. If you have the money to invest in them, go for it. But be vigilant to the research.
I find that another controversial supplement are the varied glucosamine supplements. There is research that says it works, and more that says it doesn’t work. On this, I find the results are varied from person to person, and it may actually depend on how your body processes it. For my husband and me, we can feel a huge difference if we don’t take the daily pill. A couple of my doctors swear by it, and one says it’s hogwash. We (the Royal We) will never get a straight answer on this. Could be a question for Cecil.
All supplements are woo unless there’s a diagnosed need to take them. Let me repeat that: All supplements are woo unless there’s a diagnosed need to take them.
Most of us have a diet that is varied enough to supply us with everything we require.
Supplements are a scam unless you have a dietary restriction that prevents you from eating a varied diet.
Why do they reqiure women of child bearing age to take prenatal vitamins before, during, and after pregnancy? I don’t mind but I also hate taking anything I don’t need
What is your goal? Are there chronic diseases you are trying to avoid, if so which ones?
Type 2 diabetes and CVD run in my family. Because of that I take magnesium citrate and vitamin D3, both of which can help with both of those conditions. However I don’t think magnesium makes a difference for various other diseases. It is supposedly helpful for mood, so I also take it for that.
What brand multivitamin are you taking? you need to take a high quality one, there are only a handful of brands that are good IMO.
The aspirin may not be necessary, esp at that dose. An 81mg tablet might be better, plus I’ve read the benefits and the drawbacks cancel each other out (among the elderly). People may get less heart disease, but they get more bleeding so healthwise it could be a wash.
I take several of those supplements, plus others. I take ALCAR & ALA along with the CoQ10 and Resveratrol.
“Healthy individuals who already eat a balanced diet but also take multivitamins could be spending money unnecessarily, an investigation by Choice found.”
Well sure, if you have wonderful eating habits and no health concerns, but that doesn’t describe many people. I take Centrum multivitamins. $10 for a 3-month supply. I’ll spend $3/month on something that might help and can’t hurt.
If that’s your attitude, I’d like to interest you in a rock I have for sale. It may repel tigers. Having it on or around your person won’t hurt and it might help. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be so sure that taking unneeded vitamins can’t hurt. My rock, however, carries a money-back guarantee if you are eaten by a tiger.
Most people have a better diet than you seem to think and no, they don’t need a multivitamin. Please see my earlier post where I was warned off any multivitamin that has potassium. Unless you’ve been looked at you don’t actually know if you’re getting enough of a vitamin/mineral or if you’re inadvertently getting too much of something.
More and more I’m coming to think that if a person needs a particular supplement that should purchase just what they need instead of a one-size-fits-all pill.
I know vitamins can be toxic at high levels, but typically not with just a normal multivitamin. Anyway, like I said, all the article you first posted says is that it’s probably not beneficial to people with optimum diets and no health problems. That’s not me anyway, I don’t always eat great and I tend to be anemic. My doctors think it’s a good idea for me to take a multivitamin, so that’s a little different than the magic rock, which is only recommended by my chiropractor.
I couldn’t see your WSJ article, it says it’s available to subscribers.
Centrum only has 2% of your RDA of potassium. It doesn’t have megadoses of anything. I agree that people really need to be cautious with those. And I don’t think most Americans have that great of a diet. We wouldn’t have the obesity rate we do if that was true, along with some other health problems.
There’s a longish article in the Guardian on this topic which I found interesting - in essence, vitamins are woo and possibly actively damaging, apart from a specific few. (“Some dietary supplements actually might be of value. Of the 51,000 new supplements on the market, four might be of benefit for otherwise healthy people: omega-3 fatty acids to prevent heart disease; calcium and vitamin D in postmenopausal women, to prevent bone thinning; and folic acid during pregnancy, to prevent birth defects.”)
I wasn’t taking megadoses, I was just taking a multi-vitamin. In my case it was, apparently, enough to raise my levels into the caution level. That’s my point - unless you’ve been looked at by a doctor who has actually put some thought into the matter (rather than a kneejerk prescription for all patients) you don’t know. I wasn’t taking megadoses of potassium, I wasn’t using salt substitute, I wasn’t doing anything unusual but for some reason my potassium levels are way high. We still don’t know why (the usual suspects, like kidney issues, have been ruled out). For me, personally, though, that mere 2% is still not safe.
Which is why you’re constantly told to let your doctor know what you take including over the counter supplements. Until I got a call from a doctor who sounded somewhat panicking and was frantically going down a checklist of items and asking me about potential symptoms that really didn’t hit home for me.
Doctors don’t know everything. Especially when it comes to supplements and nutrition. You have to take responsibility for your own health and *consult *with a doctor, sure, along with your other research, but it’s YOUR body, and no one cares as much about it as you do.
Find a doctor who is open to your questions and your research and who treats you like a partner in managing your health, not like an uppity child. Some doctors will actually scold you for reading and researching on your own… I have a friend whose *former *physician rolled his eyes and sighed at my friend’s questions, accusing him of “self-diagnosing.” I repeat, doctors don’t know everything, so find one who can admit this and who will encourage you to become knowledgeable. [/lecture]
Centrum has what, 100mg of potassium? A banana has 400, the same as eight ounces of milk. You might as well warn everyone never to eat a quarter of a banana, or never to drink 2oz of milk if you are going to warn people never to take multivitamins unless being checked by a doctor.
I take a high quality multivitamin, ever since I started my fingernails have been growing in faster and my urge to bite them has gone away (and its not placebo, when I took cheap multivitamins that didn’t happen), so I am happy with my decision. And not everything outside of a doctors office is woo. Rx interactions, doctor errors and hospital infections kill 300,000 people a year, far far more than all the alternative woo put together. Medicine is not something that can be easily divided into a black and white ‘safe, effective’ vs ‘useless, dangerous woo’.
I think most doctors think it’s a good/not bad idea for most people to take a multivitamin though. Unless there’s a specific reason to believe there’s an issue with a person getting too much of some vitamin or nutrient, I’ve never heard of a doctor saying not to take moderate levels of supplements. Not that I think doctors are infallible because I definitely don’t, but I still don’t see any research saying that taking Centrum or Flinstone’s vitamins are *bad *for the average person, and they could be beneficial.
I’m sure I don’t need everything in the vitamin, but as a woman, vegetarian, person with depression, and borderline anemic, I think calcium, vitamin D, zinc, iron, vitamin B12, and folic acid are all things I should be taking, and one multivitamin is the cheapest and most convenient way to do it.
I was taking a lot of ibuprofen because of chronic knee pain. Then my doctor told me to see a nephrologist (kidney doctor). She said I had stage 3 kidney disease, and told me to take Aleve instead, and also to cut down on my protein consumption. The problem, though, is that I can’t take more than 3 Aleve per day (4 if I really need it), and it’s not quite enough to mask the knee pain. But it helps, and my kidneys are doing better now.
I see an excellent endocrinologist for my type 2 diabetes, and he knows about the supplements I’m taking. He’s very good at telling me which ones I should add or adjust or discontinue.
I know ACE inhibitors (and probably ARBs), aside from being good for blood pressure can function as a nephroprotective drug. If you have hypertension asking your dr if switching to an ACE inhibitor is a good idea could be something to discuss.
I doubt it. You’d hope that doctors keep up with news.
In any event, it’s one thing if you go to your doctor and ask if you should take a multivitamin and she goes, “Meh, it probably won’t hurt” because it probably won’t. A doctor might say the same if you asked if you should get an anti-tiger rock. It’s different if your doctor recommends supplements for a reason, like you’re trying to get pregnant.
If your diet is really as bad as you’re making it out to be, IMO you would do yourself a greater service by eating right than trying to fix a bad diet with pills.
