I used to take a daily multivitamin/mineral for the over-50 crowd, just because. I also took glucosamine/condroitin tablets. But I read far too many times that those things pretty much did nothing for normal, healthy adults, so I quit taking them. I don’t feel any different, and my bloodwork was satisfactory at my last physical, so I guess they weren’t doing anything for me.
Unlike my mother, I’m disinclined to self-medicate based on stuff I read…
So it seems that the consensus here on supplementation can be summarized as follows:
But if vitamin E and vitamin C supplements are harmful, why aren’t foods that are rich in vitamins E and C also harmful to consume? Why are vitamin E supplements bad but somehow eating almonds (1 cup has 180% of the RDA) is okay? Sounds like the Naturalistic fallacy to me.
And what about fortified foods? No one ever seems to address why these are okay but DIY fortification is harmful.
It’s also worth noting that if there’s something in natural foods that magically makes them healthy, whatever it is they contain could be extracted and put in pill form. How is eating an actual tomato healthier than eating a supplement that contains the appropriate concentrations of vitamins A, C, B6, K, manganese, potassium, phytosterols, and polyphenols?
Because of bio-Absorption. Your Body Needs some things, like iron, you eat stuff with iron, … but of the x mg of iron you eat, your intestine only absorbs 10%, the rest goes out. Why? Because of your personal biochemistry, or the state of yoru intestine; because the iron you eat is not in an easily accessible state…
E.g. when you read about the spinach myth, it says that the iron in fresh spinach (as opposed to dry spinach, which was used for the measurement table, hence the higher Content) is in a state of low accessability; and in General, acid helps the Body to Access iron - so you should drink e.g. Orange Juice with your spinach.
The Problem of “How high a % of the mg. of nutrients you are eating is being absorbed?” is General a Problem (the other Problem is “How many nutrients are in the Food you buy at the Supermarket” because some regions are nutrient-depleted, so the Food grown there doesn’t contain as much iodine or folic acid or … as usual), hence why a blood test is a good way to find out your actual Levels (taking into account that things like Vitamin D keeps changing from state to state, and that Levels can fluctuate from day to day).
That’s why most doctors recommend first a Change of what you eat, because so far, studies Point that the combination of nutrients in natural Food makes it easier accessible for the Body than only presenting one nutrient in form of a pill.
And then after a few weeks, another Check-up should be done to see if your blood Levels have improved, and how much.
I know from the push for elder People, esp. women, to take more Calcium against the osteoporosis, that giving pills has only 50% accessability or less, so the doctors have to adjust the dose accordingly; and why scientists are studying which form is better accessible.
Experimentation without doctor supervision, and blood checks regularly, is useless. Doctors say that the average Person in the Western world is not in danger of not getting enough vitamins or nutrients - though their definitions of average means: well-educated enough and with enough Money to eat a well-balanced diet (no McD), as recommended (including the 5 handful of veggies/fruit a day and so on); not pregnant; not Smoking; not under lots of stress; not buying Food from regions low in nutrients…
They also say that you can’t Balance out a bad diet (Burgers and Chips) by swallowing a multi-Vitamin tablet each day, but that you should Switch your diet. Because a bad diet causes multiple Problems beyond “not enough Vitamin C”.
Vitamins come in two Basic Groups: water-soluble and fat-soluble. Eat too much water-soluble (which can happen with pills, but rarely with Food), and you piss your Money away.
Eat too much fat-soluble, however, and you risk actual disease from too much Vitamin, like too much Vitamin A.
So don’t Experiment. Ask a doctor or certified (studied) nutrician. That’s why they are experts.
Who eats an entire cup of almonds?
So in other words you went to a doctor, he did tests, you told him your symptoms and you discussed Options, and he finally prescribed you something from a pharmacy with a guaranteed dose.
The way most People do it, however, is to not follow a good diet, and just start buying some supplements somewhere, and taking it without knowing how much they Need, how much is too much, how they interact…
That’s what People are referring to with the blanket Statement.
It’s like saying “Don’t take medicines nilly-willy without reason, don’t take medicines your friend was proscribed” What it means is “Go to a doctor and take what he prescribes, but don’t self-proscribe”.
The way I read it is that recently (well, probably about 10 years ago by now) based on results from the Nurses study, the recommended dose for Vitamin D was raised by an order of Magnitude to prevent against cancer.
And Vitamin D is indeed finicky, because it Switches from active to deactive pro-state on its own (Also why it’s difficult to measure in the blood).
Me, but I probably wouldn’t eat an entire cup of Brazil nuts (3,643% RDA for selenium).
I don’t think that’s a fair summary, and I’m not seeing the Naturalistic Fallacy in any of the comments here. The basic question was whether it makes sense to take vitamin supplements.
I think a summary would be:
(1) All nutritional guidelines should be evidence-based.
(2) Just because vitamin deficiencies can be a serious health problem, that does not imply that taking multivitamin supplements is prudent as “insurance”.
(3) People in developed countries eating normal diets rarely have vitamin deficiencies, except in a few specific cases that have been mentioned.
(4) There is some evidence that excessive doses of vitamins may be harmful.
The sensible conclusion that has been given seems to be that we should take specific supplements when they are specifically indicated, but avoid taking multivitamins “just in case”.
The fact that certain foods may naturally contain large amounts of vitamins that we might be unaware of, and that some processed foods may already be “fortified” with vitamins or supplements that we may be unaware of, would just seem to strengthen the recommendation that taking unnecessary additional multivitamin supplements risks inadvertently raising our intake to levels that may be harmful to our health.
Because the Person who eats a balanced, recommend diet, won’t eat a whole Cup of almonds, only a few. Yes, People can and have gotten unhealthy from eating too much natural vitamins - there are a few cases of People literally turning orange from eating a bunch of carrots each day.
But that’s not a normal diet.
Don’t have cites for US, but here, the consumer advocates warn against the multivitamin Juices and children’s cereal for that reason - that using a cheap, low-vitamin Juice and Dumping a bunch of artifical Vitamin into it; or taking a highly-sugared cereal and adding some iron, does not make it healthy, and is misleading Advertising (a few products were thus forbidden, but not all).
Because the supplements aren’t structured that way. The Supplement contains one, or ten, vitamins, and nothing else.
If scientists had completly catalogued each molecule a tomato consists of, they could reassemble a tomato. (Or you could just eat the real tomato.) The Thing is, we haven’t catalogued all parts of a tomatoe yet - it’s only at most 20 years ago that the “secondary plant molecules” were discovered, that, along with vitamins and Minerals, are thought to be important for cancer prevention in the Long run. (Long run means: it will take decades of Research for results)
Also, maybe you haven’t noticed, we don’t really have replicators yet. Knowing the chemical structure of each molecule does not mean it can be produced cheaper and easier than just growing a tomato for real.
That’s also probably why the vitamins and Minerals in a tomato are more accessible for the human Body than just taking a pill that contains Vitamin A: because there are lots of molecules interacting with each other and with your Body (which is also a complex System of hundreds of different molecules interacting with each other and with the tomato molecules), whereas the Vitamin tablet only contains Vitamin K and nothing else. Which seems to be why the Body is having Problems accessing it.
Along similar lines, I used to drink this tea/juice thing in college that proudly proclaimed it served up 100% of your RDA of chromium.
This, esp. Just as many (not all) People fall into the “diet coke” fallacy - that eating a burger plus Chips can be balanced out with a diet coke (or eating a huge cake can be balanced by drinking coffee without sugar), many People find it easier to follow a stressful, exercise-less, Lifestyle with a bad diet and then “take a Vitamin pill just to be sure” instead of changing their Lifestyle.
So the possibility is: if their Lifestyle is healthy, the pill can push them into overdose territory, which is a health risk. So certainly harm.
If their Lifestyle is not healthy enough, taking a pill helps them short-term, but gives them the false sense of security, and they don’t Change their Lifestyle, so they still get all the other negatives from bad Lifestyle.
This is what happened with Vitamin E - it was touted as anti-cancer, so lots of smokers added it, but kept Smoking. Turned out in high doses it actually accelerated cancer. Oops. Quitting Smoking would not have had any side effects.
I’ve done that. I really, really like to eat nuts. In fact, I usually have a half cup of nuts as a snack during my first break at work. (Not just almonds - mixed nuts, cashews, etc.)
That’s a bit oversimplified. Supplements ARE good if you have a definite deficiency that has been actually diagnosed, and only up to a level that remedies that deficiency, not in mega-doses.
Actually, you probably could eat excessive amounts of almonds and run into problems, either because you’re not eating anything else, or enough of anything else, or becoming obese due to excessive calories or something else. It’s just a lot harder to over-do it with the specific food items than with pills.
But, more in line with what I think is your actual question, we may have evolved some decent control mechanisms to prevent excessive intake of certain substances through our diets. When certain nutrients are scare our bodies can increase our absorption of them through the intestine, and likewise when they’re abundant our bodies can become less efficient at absorbing them.
Fortifications in commercially available foods are done in a fairly controlled manner, do not include mega-doses, the quality and quantity of those supplements/fortifications are controlled (rather than the wild west lack of regulation in the US supplement industry), and are done to prevent very specific and limited problems. Thus, vitamin D supplementation in milk to help prevent rickets, or iodine in salt to prevent thyroid problems. Prior to supplementation there were significant populations that suffered widely from deficiencies, such as mountain populations having cretinism. Even so, wide fortification of foods is not without debate, and may depend also on genetic traits in the population. Some populations in Europe have rates of hemachromatosis higher than the rest of the world which makes affected individuals prone to iron-overload, and in such areas it is NOT a good idea to iron-fortify foods.
Or iodine - many Areas in Europe far away from the ocean are depleted in iodine from centuries of farming (and rain); but a small Segment of Population has a disease that is activated from too much iodine. So adding iodine to all salt, and all salt used in finished Foods, means weighing the risk of getting a few People sick from too much, vs. potentially getting many People sick from lack.
Or labelling everything and offering alternatives and education, so People can see their doctor and know to avoid iodine-fortified stuff if they are suspectible.
Aside from the Problem that we haven’t mapped fully a tomato yet - what tomato do you want to re-built as pill? Because there is not “The tomato”, there are dozens of different variants, differing in not only taste, but Vitamin and other Contents.
So mapping and reproducing just got much more difficult.
Also, in the past decades, selective breeding (the old-fashioned Kind, not GM) has led to e.g. wheat with a high starch/ gluten Content, so the rolls could get bigger and bigger - but during that process, some essential amino acids were lost.
With veggies, the trend has gone to make them sweeter and better-tasting - so People will actually eat them - but now scientists wonder if the bitter-tasting stuff isn’t very important to health. It’s difficult to find out, because a lot of different types of plants have almost gone. There used to hundreds of different apples, or potatoes, adapted to local climate, against pests, and so on, now it’s shrunk down to a few dozen that produce the biggest yield, and nothing else. That’s a Problem not only for agrictulture, but also for Nutrition.
We don’t even know about vitamins that Long, let alone bitter-tasting flavours, or plant-colour molecules (Apparently, the more colourful, the healthier…)
So if we don’t know what’s important - because that takes decades of Research - why would companies re-produce it? Each different molecule they add to the tomato pill has to be produced seperatley, making it very expensive.
Me, too. I never heard anything about restricting Vitamin A. I know they removed the Beta Keratine from AREDS2 because it was determined that such a high doseage was leading to lung cancer in former smokers. But I’ve never been told to skip A. (FTR, I was told to start the vitamins by my opthamologist.)
But actually there is - see for example post 110of that thread.
It’s not conclusive evidence but it is highly suggestive of a slight increased risk, particularly from the B-vitamins at levels in the typical daily multis. Thing is that the benefit of not being deficient in them to developing babies (prevention of neural tube defects) was so high making sure women of childbearing age got at least enough was a high priority. Thus foods of a wide sort have been fortified to make it well nigh impossible to not get enough. But then thus taking a supplement gets into excess levels pretty easily. And excess can cause harms (specifically an increased risk of colon cancer). Seems to anyway.
No question if are a female of childbearing age possibly trying to become pregnant you should take you vitamin though.
As above - if there were no fortification then a multi might be a good idea. But because there is fortification a multi is more likely to push total intake into excess ranges.
What are the differences between whole foods and the parts all loose?
First that we don’t know what all those parts are.
Second is the difference between my smartphone and all of the parts in it in a jumble on the table in a pile. Are that pile of parts and my phone going to function the same?
The structure of how the parts are put together matters. Put all the parts in the right structure what do have? The actual food.
what is false?
your first cite
your second cite
your third cite
Seems to me they’re all saying vitamin deficiency is very rare.
mc