So I’ve been trying to change my life a bit to get healthier lately, and along with working out with a personal trainer & eating better, I’ve been taking a multi-vitamin. Centruum 1 a Day for Men or something. It just seemed like something that would help.
Research online gives me results varying from ‘Vitamins can make you immortal, never stop stuffing yourself with them.’ to ‘Vitamins are evil and can cause pregnancy in men.’
So does it help? What do I get from the vitamin that wouldn’t get from eating a more balanced diet? Should I keep taking it, or is there some way it can hurt me?
If you look at the recommended daily allowances (RDA) for macro and micro nutrients it’s pretty hard to fill them all every day, but if you eat a relatively balanced diet with good variety you should average out fine. A single multivitamin a day can’t hurt you, it’s those people pumping 40 times the RDA of something that get into trouble. I’m on Atkins, so I have trouble getting enough calcium and magnesium, so I take one. I just pick up the cheapest multi they have.
Taking one a day isn’t going to hurt you and “may” give some benefit. But stop there. It is easier than you think to add just one more for calcium, 3 a day for extra C, one to boost immunity, etc…and before youknow it you need a bowl and a spoon to get them all in every day.
I will add that vitamin D deficiency can be a concern. Make sure you’re getting enough sunlight (amount needed varies based on latitude, percentage of body exposed to sun, and skin pigmentation), or failing that, if you’re not drinking enough milk to provide enough vitamin D (at least 4 cups a day, frankly) consider a vitamin D supplement. 1000 U a day of D3 is good, and cheap.
Yeah my understanding, of the general state of scientific opinion (as a interested amateur). Is there is no really evidence of great benefit (other than the prevention of serious vitamin deficiencies which your extremely unlikely to have in this day and age), but they are extremely unlike to be detrimental to your health if you keep within the RDA. On the whole its far more important to ensure you eat healthy balanced diet.
The way Michael Pollan put it in the “In Defense of Food” is you should be “the kind of person” who takes a multivitamin. Evidence shows people who take multivitamins are healthier than those who don’t, but when you try and do a double-blind placebo study of the vitamins themselves you find no real benefit. The fact is “the kind of person” who takes a multivitamin also has a healthy lifestyle in other ways that are far more important than whether or not you actually take a multivitamin.
Iron deficiency anemia is common among women who menstruate every month, especially for those of us who don’t eat a lot of red meat. Eating a lot of red meat has some other health risks associated with it, so a doctor might tell you to take an iron supplement rather than do that.
I’d stick to the vitamin supplements that list what amounts of which specific vitamins they have, and stay away from the ones that claim to “boost immunity” or other claims like that.
True, but while getting that Iron from a multivitamin is better than having anemia, it is still better to eat enough red meat (or spinach, or whatever) to get that Iron from an actual food. Who’s to say what other more subtle, and as yet unidentified, deficiencies are caused by eat insufficient amounts of natural iron-laden foods. That is the basic point of “In Defense of Food”, its very easy to identify chronic deficiencies such as Anemia, Beri-Beri, or Scurvy to a particular nutrient. But very hard to link more long term health benefits or detriments to a particular nutrient.
Anybody have some good statistics on the rates of vitamin deficiency? My google-fu is not good today. I know that, say, scurvy is pretty rare except in the odd case of a college student eating nothing but ramen. Still, given the lack of consumption of fruits and vegetables, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people weren’t getting the RDA amounts of something. (Though I wonder if those numbers are conservatively set rather high – I doubt someone who gets 50% RDA of vitamin C would get scurvy).
That was definitely my understanding. Here is a link about Ricketsin Geogia (as a result of using baby formula). While scary the number seem to be pretty low (40 cases in a two year period).
Indeed. But at that point talking about nutrients is less important than talking about foods (again talking as a someone who has just read In Defense of Food). Its easy to show scientifically that, say, less than say 5% RDA of vitamin C daily will give you scurvy (I think the actual figure is somewhere around there by could be totally wrong), and giving you vitamin C will cure you. But what about 50%, 25%, 75% ? There may well be a noticable link between people who eat those levels of Vitamin C and diseases such as cancer. But that doesn’t mean that taking Vitamin C tablets will stop you getting those diseases. Its just as likely that the lack of some other nutrient in fruit and vegetables (and all the other foods that have vitamin C, and those people aren’t eating enough of) that is actually causing those diseases (or interaction between nutrients in those foods, or some other even more complicated factor)…
I once read a dietician who, when asked about multivitamins, said, ‘I try not to take any pills, for any reason, unless it’s absolutely necessary.’
I’ve always thought that’s pretty good advice. A lot of the pills people take day to day are surprisingly toxic (paracetamol and ibuprofen for instance), and even when it comes to multivitamins, you don’t know what effect they could have on you specifically, there hasn’t been systematic research on their long-term effects, etc.
Personally I think the best way to go to be healthy is to try and get what you need from your diet. If you’ve tried working out different diets and there’s no way to get a good amount of a particular vitamin (you said you’re lactose intolerant, for instance), then go for the vitamin pills. But I think ‘avoid taking pills unless you need to’ sounds like good advice.
