so will taking 2k a day of D3 like my doc says I need actually help?
at least joe weider dosent have propaganda posted on every gnc window anymore unlike the last time they tried to pass some rules ………
Do they also have varying degrees of kidney failure? It’s been long known that people in kidney failure develop severe osteoporosis, but it was not known until relatively recently that the kidney produces a hormone that changes ingested or sun-made vitamin D into a form that is more usable by the body. They can also become anemic, because the kidney also produces a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production. Many non-medical people have heard of it because it’s been used as a sports supplement; it’s sold under the brand names Procrit or Epogen.
People with pernicious anemia also need supplemental vitamin B-12, taken either nasally, SL, or injected, because their stomachs lack a necessary factor to enable its absorption.
The strangest dietary deficiency I’ve ever heard of was phenylalanine. When we learned about it in college biology, specifically in association with PKU, one of my classmates said that a few years earlier, she’d had some mysterious symptoms which revealed a deficiency, and she had to take supplements. PKU is the best-known disease detected by a blood test at birth (see footnote) and most people have heard of it, whether they know it or not. Ever noticed that warning on soda cans and other low-calorie foods that says “Phenylketonurics: Contains phenylalanine” and wondered if it pertains to you? Quick answer: If you don’t know what it is, you don’t need to worry about it.
The best-known PKU victim was Carol Buck, the mentally disabled daughter of author Pearl S. Buck. She was normal at birth, in the 1920s, and became disabled as a young child, which is typical for this syndrome; she was not properly diagnosed until middle age, at which time it was too late to do anything for her.
Footnote: There have long been rumors that the heel stick done on newborns to test them for PKU and other metabolic diseases is actually the implantation of a microchip. In the late 1990s, I worked at a hospital where I had a lot of contact with OB nurses, and asked one of them if this was true. She said it wasn’t; I told her I was kidding, and she knew I was too, but it wasn’t the first time she’d been asked this. :smack:
Sure, if you need it.
(note: I am not a doctor. But I have an elderly father with severe gastro intestinal disorders, and have spent the last 2 years studying just about everything printed on nutrition from all possible sources (CAM to John Hopkins) )
The tricky part of vitamins and minerals are that that they are necessary to stay alive, and many ailments and medications can mess with how you body absorbs, retains, and utilizes them.
However. . .
The adage that a healthy person doesn’t need to supplement is absolutely true. Most people get everything they need from the food they eat; even if your diet is the “typical American calorie massacre”. The problem comes in because a lot of people don’t think they are healthy or that they could be healthier.
am77494 everything you’ve listed above is and indication of dis-health.
You should never take over the counter meds for chronic problems.They are for temporary relief. Proton pump inhibitors specifically say to not use for more than 21 days. If you need ppi’s everyday, you most likely have some gastro intestinal ailment. These ailments can do alot more than just mess with your mag levels. SEE A DOCTOR! Diabetes is a disease which can have serious effects on how you process nutrition. SEE A DOCTOR!. Vit B12 deficiency in infants (which can produce autism like symptoms) is a rare but serious disorder. SEE A DOCTOR! whether or not B12 helps actual autism is not yet known.
Lots of prescribed meds can affect how your body utilizes vitamins and minerals, and these “side effects” are well known and the doctor who prescribed the meds should be able to tell you what to look for.
If you are unable to see a doctor, then do alot of research. Randomly trying to treat yourself by visiting the supplements aisle will provide a wide variety of results, from wasting your money to making the problem worse. All ailments which require you to take vitamins or minerals require specific ones at specific doses. For example: calcium, vit D and potassium play an intricate dance with each other. So if you start taking a calcium supplement because you’ve gone dairy free and are worried about your bones you could accidentally cause yourself to become potassium deficient which can be worse.
tl/dr: healthy people dont need supplements. If you have to ask whether or not you can are healthy; YOU ARE. You will know when you are unhealthy, you body is not subtle in it’s communicating this point.
mc
Either fasting or tofu.
More specifically, EPO (erythropoietin) is a banned substance for professional athletes and some athletes have been sanctioned for its use. That put it in the headlines.
One can certainly make an argument that the supplement industry should be more regulated, but that it is unregulated is frequently repeated and not true. Plenty of info regarding the FDA and supplement regs in the paper below.
We don’t know that and how “healthy” and “need” is defined is relevant. Below is a paper regarding magnesium deficiency alone. I would argue that there is evidence that certain individuals (reasonably defined as “healthy”) may benefit in health (“need”) with magnesium supplementation, and I can base that on evidence in the below paper alone.
Yeah, but is it the chicken and the egg? Most people I’ve known who take all sorts of ludicrous vitamins and supplements are usually people who are one of two things- gimpy or sickly-ish to begin with, and hoping to self-medicate themselves, or some kind of bodybuilder types who think it’ll help them build muscle.
Nope.
If we could just know we are healthy so easily, screening tests would be unneeded.
It VERY often is subtle in communicating that point. In many cases, so subtle there are no symptoms recognized by the person. Yet, they drop dead one day from blocked coronary arteries or something else, or are surprised when a doc diagnoses them with a serious condition.
The three most common deficiencies in the USA are B6, Iron (women & young kids), and D. Vit C runs 4th. About 10% of the population has some deficiency.
So, yeah, a daily multivite is by no means a bad thing.
Vegans should add B12.
My wife’s MD has prescribed Biotin, and that’s common for older people.
Folic acid is critical during pregnancy.
I wasn’t aware that eating tofu made for a restrictive diet. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, vegetarians would want to keep track of a few vitamins like B12, but otherwise the diet itself isn’t particularly restrictive.
I’m no expert on fasting, but if you do a periodic 24 hour fast I don’t think you’d need additional supplements. If you are on a 500 calorie per day diet then you would have to carefully look at what you are eating and supply the missing parts.
Well, you said “you” and UpToDate.com said “for adults with a balanced diet.”
I think most people* would agree with that quote by UpToDate.com. The argument is usually that they are not, or may not be, getting a balanced diet. The point in taking them is to balance the diet. It’s similar to saying, “if your diet is balanced, you don’t have to do anything further to balance it.”
That quote from UpToDate.com implies that there is convincing evidence that fairly low dose multivitamins may be helpful for those that don’t have a balanced diet, or there would be no good reason to add that qualifier.
There isn’t one “current medical opinion” on most anything regarding nutrition.
*There are certainly many people that believe that mega-dosing certain vitamins are helpful, but I’m hopeful that it’s not most people.
Let’s look at this part of your quote again (bolding mine):
Would the supplements have been helpful before one got diagnosed with one of the above? Of course. Do some people have vitamin or mineral deficiencies that go un-diagnosed or aren’t diagnosed because many people don’t get preventative medical attention and/or have deficiencies that aren’t recognized? Of course. See the link in post 29 which relates to just one mineral.
Regarding that one mineral, the following is from the most recent published review on magnesium:
I don’t know what definition UpToDate.com goes with for “balanced diet”, but I would think if 50% of Americans aren’t getting the EAR for just one specific mineral (the EAR is even lower than the RDA), there are many Americans that don’t have a balanced diet. Or maybe there is a less stringent definition for what entails a balanced diet. In that case, I believe I have shown when cherry-picking just one mineral, those that have a balanced diet yet don’t meet the RDA or EAR for it may benefit their health by supplementing with it according the the current literature.
So, yeah, I have a gastrointestinal problem, and I see a doctor, a pcp and a gastroenterologist. And I take a PPI every day. And my pcp has both told me that long-term use of PPIs is risky, and I should take as little as I can, but has also told me that if I don’t treat my heartburn it is likely to develop into esophageal cancer. My gastroenterologist just told me to take lots of PPI, but when I told him what my PCP said, he said “huh, he’s my doctor, too, I guess I should ask him about that.”
It’s not as if there’s one true perfect answer that every doctor knows.
And I am non-the-less relatively healthy. But I do wonder about vitamin supplements. I’ve been tested low-ish for vitamin D, for instance. At one point I was prescribed some huge dose of D, eventually my levels were normal, and I don’t believe they’ve been tested since. And I wonder about other deficiencies I might be acquiring due to my long-term PPI use. which is likely to be a life-long thing.
Thank you for those studies. Very interesting. But, I have a couple of quibbles with you.
The magnesium study does seem to suggest that Mg deficiency is more prevalent than most thought, but it still only places it at around 15% of the population, and it seems to be confined to 3 main groups: post menopausal women, the very active (athletes), and people with malabsorption issues:
so not really something that most of the population should be worried about, unless you are already sick (and unfortunately post menopause has so many issues associated with it that it should be treated as an illness) - but that doctors should watch more than they do.
As for the self reporting study; I read it opposite of the way you do. That knowledge of disease leads to an increase in the perceived health of an individual being negative. That is; if you know you have a disease you feel worse than if you don’t, not that if you don’t know you have a disease you feel fine.
People DO walk around with undiagnosed diseases, it is true. But I wouldn’t say “very often”. For example: It is estimated that 8 million Americans have heart disease and don’t even know it. And while that number may seem huge, it represents under 3% of the population. If you are walking around worrying that you have asymptomatic heart disease then you are causing yourself grief for no reason.
And that’s the larger point I was trying to make. Alot of people feel they are unhealthier than they actually are, and turn to supplements as some sort of magic pill. And most of the time they are wrong.
mc
And if you’re deficient in some micronutrient because of malabsorbtion issues, then increasing your intake of the vitamin itself might not even help. You need to figure out what’s causing the malabsorption, and fix that, which means asking a doctor.
What claim of mine does your “15% of the population” statement quibble with?
Are you talking about the first paper I linked to? This is what is says regarding the “15% of the population”:
How does that “still” place it there?
Some of that paper:
One of the major points of the paper is that the percentages are likely to be underestimated due to the diffculty in diagnosing magnesium deficiency:
Skipping right to the conclusion:
I didn’t make that claim in the bolded part above. The point I was making with the information therein is that it contradicts this statement of yours:
“If you have to ask whether or not you can are healthy; YOU ARE.”
See what you did there? You changed “unhealthy” to “with undiagnosed diseases” and “VERY often is subtle in communicating that point” to “very often walking around with those diseases.”
I am stating that your claim
is wrong.
This is off-topic as the topic of supplementation isn’t just regarding heart disease (why are you cherry-picking heart disease?)…but where did you get those numbers? And why compare by percentage of the total U.S. population and not just the adult population? Since you’re mentioning those that don’t know it, don’t you think those that do were once those that didn’t?
I found the following:
True:
It was also advertised on TV for a while, allegedly aimed at cancer patients (and it’s used for that) but most of the ads were on sports programs.