Vitamins Are a Waste of Money–And They're Not Helping You, Anyway

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/vitamin-bs/386126/?single_page=true

by tokenadult • 11 years ago

10 6 11 years ago

mrfusion• 11 years ago

I don't know why this keeps coming up. It's proven that a significant number of people are deficient in vitamin D, and also Magnesium I believe.

I'm also of the opinion that no one is getting enough potassium (but vitamins won't help with that).

MollyR2• 11 years ago

Yes! Deficiencies could occur from multiple sources as well.

I found out from my doctor I was deficient in vitamin D and calcium probably due to diet I'm allergic to milk. So I started taking vitamin D and calcium supplements.

Later I found out from my personal genome study, that my body doesn't process vitamin B correctly, so I need much larger doses than the average person.

I think once people begin to get personalized genome information, a lot of misinformation surrounding diet,vitamins, and nutrients will be cleaned up.

drdoooom• 11 years ago

where does one obtain a genome study for themselves?

hcarvalhoalves• 11 years ago

You're right about deficiencies, but it's more complicated than just increasing intake. For instance:

- For most people, vitamin D is lack of sunlight.

- Magnesium absorption depends on how well your intestines are working because ~50% is excreted. It's also related to diet and lifestyle (soda hinders absorption, coffee and stress increase excretion). On top of that, low intra-celullar Mg levels are not detectable with a simple blood test, so most people don't even know they are deficient until it gets severe.

- Too much vitamin A is toxic, but our body can metabolize vitamin A from carotenoids like Astaxanthin which are much better tolerated.

There are now more studies concentrating on the precursors to vitamins and absorption than the vitamins themselves.

stolio• 11 years ago

Here's the pith:

"At the base of it, we do need those 13 vitamins. If you don’t have enough of them, you’ll die in often quite gruesome ways. Scurvy is a horrible disease. It prevents your body from making collagen, which is the connective tissue that holds your body together, so you sort of fall apart from within—your teeth fall out, your connections all loosen, and you hemorrhage and die. So I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that we do need vitamins. And there are a lot of people in the world who don’t have access to them—the latest estimate I read was 2 billion people [who are vitamin-deficient]. If you give someone vitamin A and they’re suffering from nutritional blindness, which is a stage of vitamin A deficiency, they will regain their sight, often within days. And that’s crazy. It’s like a miracle drug. But it doesn’t translate into the idea that we seem to want to have, which is that if you can cure nutritional blindness with vitamin A, then if you take 17 times that amount in a pill, you’ll be able to see in the dark. The idea that more is better, and more gives you superpowers, is not true."

Saying "vitamins are a waste of money" is arguing against the extreme case where somebody believes they'll gain super-powers from vitamin loading, but it doesn't seem to be directed at people who take vitamins to avoid deficiencies.

Vitamins Are a Waste of Money–And They're Not Helping You, Anyway

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