The problem with taking too many vitamins

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24563590

by pacemkr • 13 years ago

54 43 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

I don't feel this is a very good article.

IMHO the key to understanding vitamin supplementation is first, to know which are fat-soluble (and will be stored by your body) and which are water-soluble (and will be flushed by your body when you urinate).

So, it is almost impossible to over-dose on Vitamin C, since, your body will easily eliminate anything it doesn't need - C is water-soluble.

This article covers the differences well enough: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10...

I think what drives vitamin taking is a combination of

i) people not fully trusting doctors

ii) knowing that today's food is factory-produced and may be deficient in micro-nutrients like vitamins and minerals

iii) being willing to spend a few dollars per day as an insurance policy; after all, how many drop $5 a day at Starbucks?

judk• 13 years ago

Vitmans and minerals are the easiest thing to supplement in foods, and are everywhere.

Macro nutrients are what processed food loses.

eru2• 13 years ago

What do you mean by macro nutrients?

typicalrunt• 13 years ago

In school, I was taught a mnemonic for fat soluble vitamins: DEAK. In other words, you want to "deke" [1] out of the way from these vitamins. You want to watch how much of vitamins D, E, A, K you ingest because they are fat soluble and you can easily overdose on them (unlike vitamin C). It's not a catch-all but it helps when you are taking vitamins.

[1] it's a play on words and a homonym, "deke" comes from hockey where you dodge or fake out an opponent to get around them. It must be the Canadian school system further injecting hockey into our lives. :)

nodata• 13 years ago

Do you know if the RDA amount is kept up-to-date with current research?

For those of us who want an insurance policy, have you got any recommendations on what multi-vitamins to aim for (a particular brand, maybe that you take?) Are all brands equal?

nagrom• 13 years ago

Then again, there have been several studies [0] that show that many people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in vitamin D and that the deficiency could be the root of serious health problems.

[0] E.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306

platz• 13 years ago

Solubility is important but even though vitamin c is soluble, taking too much is quite harmful aggregrated over longer time frames. http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-...

gabemart• 13 years ago

even though vitamin c is soluble, taking too much is quite harmful aggregrated over longer time frames

Which statement in that article do you believe supports the position that taking too much vitamin C is "quite harmful"?

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

Everyone at our office including me are total coffee junkies. We each pitched in a few hundred to get the best possible coffee machines. Before that we'd each be blowing like $40 a day on coffees, always trying new places at lunch, after work, before work, coffee runs to places across the street. It's really a cultural thing at our office.

We'd be sitting and coding for a few hours, and we're all just internally waiting for somebody to utter the magic words "...coffee run?".

At a moments notice we're all out the door, headphones are smashed, phones are flung, chairs are tipped over, papers are in the air!

Camillo• 13 years ago

So, it is almost impossible to over-dose on Vitamin C, since, your body will easily eliminate anything it doesn't need - C is water-soluble.

Wait, are you really arguing that it's impossible to have too much of something that is water-soluble? What about sugar? What about salt?

sp332• 13 years ago

The LD50's for a 100kg person of salt (100g), sugar (1kg) or vitamin C (1.1 kg) are huge. Long-term exposure to sugar can affect your overall health, like causing insulin resistance or just being processed into fat. Salt isn't bad for you, unless you already have a heart or kidney problem. Vitamin C might have some side effects but the evidence is very thin so far.

cko• 13 years ago

Vitamin K is fat-soluble but no upper limit has been established.

jotm• 13 years ago

Well, then don't take too many vitamins - problem solved.

And as Patrickg_zill said, fat soluble vitamins are the dangerous ones, as they accumulate instead of being flushed. Pretty much all of the other vitamins and minerals are well controlled by the body...

drakaal• 13 years ago

I used to eat the gummy vitamins like candy, I got Hypervitaminosis, and my hair started to fall out. I thought I had a horrible disease. Then we figured it out. It wasn't much fun.

capisce• 13 years ago

Ignored the "Do not exceed the recommended dosage" warning eh?

rjurney4• 13 years ago

They taste SO good.

krisgee• 13 years ago

Scary, this is exactly the reason I stay away from gummy vitamins and anything that tries to make it anything less like medicine.

fauigerzigerk• 13 years ago

Everything I've read about this in recent years seems to boil down to one simple rule of thumb: Supplement vitamin D and forget about everything else.

rjurney4• 13 years ago

Yeah, my doctor recommends 5000 IUs of D3 for the north bay area.

skore2• 13 years ago

Interesting, particularly since recent recommendations say that 4000 IUs should be the maximum dose. Any reason why s/he recommended 5k?

DanBC3• 13 years ago

EDIT: As per the article, children need A, C, and D, and women wanting to get (or who are) pregnant need some other vitamins.

But yes, mostly don't bother with anything apart from D.

cylinder• 13 years ago

Eat mountains of fresh vegetables and fruit and other whole foods and you'll get what you need. Hard part of this - keeping your fridge stocked with them.

mhurron• 13 years ago

Or you could go to your doctor where they can do tests and get an idea about what you are and are not deficient in.

alexandros• 13 years ago

Sometimes visualisations are useless overillustrations. Other times, they are enough to put a complex argument to rest. One of the latter ones:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...

rjurney4• 13 years ago

To hell with Vitamins. Eat fruits and vegetables.

mtts• 13 years ago

Nice idea. In practice, if you live in a large urban area, especially in warmer climates, by the time those fruits and vegetables get to your plate, they'll have far fewer vitamins than you'd expect.

Back when I lived in Jakarta (very large urban area, very warm) I used to get mouth ulcers constantly, despite eating more than my fair share of fruits and vegetables. The solution, according to the family GP, was to supplement vitamin C. Yeah yeah, n=1 (well, n=a family of 5, but still), but it worked and seemed to lend some validity to this theory.

objclxt• 13 years ago

...except Vitamin D, which doesn't really come in fruit and veg. Vitamin D deficiency can be a real problem if you're a vegetarian and/or work in an environment without much exposure to sun. I just had a physical and my D was way down.

juskrey• 13 years ago

The problem with taking any amount of vitamins is that they give the false feeling of security.

skore2• 13 years ago

What I'm interested in with all the recent talk (/hype) about gut health and gut bacteria transplants: Are there studies into whether the nutrients we can supplement actually don't enter our own metabolism, but instead benefit our gut bacteria which in turn benefit us?

spikels2• 13 years ago

I hope everyone understands that there is NO reliable evidence that any dietary supplements, including vitamins, provide any health benefits whatsoever to healthy people.[1] Occasionally individual studies will find an association between a particular positive outcome and a particular supplement, say breast cancer survival and vitamin D.[2] But it is just as likely to find an association with a negative outcome, say higher breast cancer risk in regular vitamin takers.[3] However none of these results has ever been found to be reproducible AFAIK.

For example a 2009 thorough review of all research on vitamin D and calcium supplements by US DHHS concluded:

The majority of the findings concerning vitamin D, calcium, or a combination of both nutrients on the different health outcomes were inconsistent.[4]

Most if not all of the studies initially finding these spurious correlations are large studies looking at lots of factors and outcomes. Unfortunately due to the nature of statistics there is always a small chance of a false positive or negative relationship and if many possible relationships are examined, such as in these large exploratory studies, it is almost a certainty that some false correlations will be found. This is why almost all of these studies say that confirmation in additional studies is required but this warning does not always make it into press reports. Occasionally a new relationship will be found that is confirmed in follow up studies. Unfortunately this confirmation has yet to be found for any supplement for any outcome in healthy people AFAIK.

FYI - Peter Norvig has a nice writeup of what to look out for when considering the results of a study.[5]

[1] Some supplements can help people with specific health issues but ask an expert such as your doctor as there are many false claims about supplements helping with specific conditions.

[2] http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/BreastCancer/...

[3] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/183880.php

[4] http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/evidence-based-reports...

[5] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Someone• 13 years ago

"I hope everyone understands that there is NO reliable evidence that any dietary supplements, including vitamins, provide any health benefits whatsoever to healthy people."

I sort of agree with that, but I also know it is kind of a tautology. 'Healthy people' can't become 'healthier people', by definition. Yet, every healthy person can imagine himself, but slightly better: better vision, more willpower, stronger, faster runner, more intelligent, etc.

Because of that, there are no 'Healthiest people'. Even the hypothetical person who wins the decathlon at the Olympics at the age of 40 in the year they won their fifth Nobel will have something to desire (a bald spot? Feeling more tired after exercise than he used to be?). In that sense, nobody is truly healthy.

That is what all the supplement sellers play at.

spikels2• 13 years ago

This is not a tautology. Every "healthy" person will someday die and will often develop cancer or heart disease or have a stroke or have one of thousands of rarer medical conditions. If any supplements actually worked they would prolong life or reduce the occurrence of any of these diseases. All of these out comes can be measured in a properly designed study. So far there is no reliable evidence that supplements help with any of these outcomes.

The problem with taking too many vitamins

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