I recently heard on the news (it was widely reported, so I assume I won’t need to set up a link), that vitamin and mineral supplements give you absolutely no protection against disease. Yet at the same time, there is a clear link between eating fruits and vegetables and disease prevention. What am I missing here?
The vitamins and minerals in tablet form are chemically identical to the ones found in fruits and vegetables, aren’t they? (I know I take a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement every day because I don’t think I am getting enough nutrition from the poor diet I have. Am I wrong to do this [outside, yes I know, of eating an unhealthy diet]?)
It’s not true that vitamin supplements give you absolutely no protection against disease. For example, if you are getting no Vitamin C in your diet at all, a Vitamin C supplement will protect you from getting scurvy.
Fiber alone hasn’t been shown to have the disease-preventing characteristics (like lowering colon cancer rates) that people once hoped it would, either.
There are thousands and thousands of different types of molecules in a single piece of fruit, while your multivitamin has, at best, a few dozen. The vast majority of the fruit components haven’t really been studied at all. The stuff you get in a multivitamin is usually the stuff that if you don’t consume any of it for a long time, will kill you or cause severe debilitation. That sort of thing is relatively easy to study in a lab, and the essential nutrients have been known for decades. What makes you live longer, have lower blood pressure or cancer risk, etc., is much tougher to pick apart.
‘Absolutely no protection against disease’ is an overstatement. As Fantome points out, supplementing will prevent you from getting the diseases that are a direct result of lacking particular vitamins/minerals. But I’m assuming that you’re talking about illnesses like cancer and heart disease, and yes, thus far, supplements have not lived up to people’s hopes for those.
Also some vitamins do double duty. In additon to their duties as a vitamin some may for instance, act as an antioxidant. Of course you could get the antioxidant effect from something else that isn’t a vitamin.
Part of the defination of what is a vitamin is a substance that will give you a specific disease (as opposed to a general syndrome) if you lack said vitamin and the return of that vitamin will cure the disease.