Vitamins?

by Lou Schuler on Jul 16, 2007 9:22 AM EDT Comment 3 comments

A friend of mine asked me an interesting question the other day: Is there any point in taking vitamins? Is there any research showing that people who take vitamins live any longer than anyone else?

I honestly don't know the answer, and because I'm more busy than I usually am in mid-summer, I didn't have time to look anything up.

I used to take all kinds of vitamins -- a multi plus individual antioxidants. I stopped taking the individual vitamins one by one. I have three bottles of vitamin E left over that I'll probably never open. When I finish with my current bottle of multis, I may stop taking those as well.

Just about every prepared food in our diets seems to have vitamins added. One protein supplement I sampled has a label that reads like a multivitamin -- a significant percentage of the RDA for everything.

In subsequent emails, my friend paraphrased something a doctor had told him recently: "It's very difficult to be vitamin deficient in America, unless you have some weird, self-imposed dietary restrictions, like vegan raw-foodist seeditarians. Or like the eco-hipster kid in the Simpsons, who said something like, 'I don't eat anything that casts a shadow.' "

Anybody have any thoughts about the relative necessity and/or importance of vitamins? Or am I going to have to do my own research?

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I take a multi-vit every day....

... mostly through habit.

But there is some supporting evidence that suggests that for active people (we are all active people here right?) the RDA's could be insufficient.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061116091853.htm

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/72/2/647S

Neither of these are conclusive enough to say everyone should be taking a vitamins but given that the negative side effects or low level (Read RDA) supplementation are such low risk it fits cleanly into the same category as green tea for me.

"It might be helping and its not hurting"

LAter

Redd

dangers of supplements and vitamins

Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry
by Dan Hurley

I came across a review of this book in the New England Journal of Medicine. It looks at the marketplace and political factors that have enabled so many unregulated so-called "natural" and herbal supplements and treatments to be sold. Unfortunately, there is often very little science to show that these things are even safe, much less effective.

Here's a cbs news story on the related subject of safety of herbal stuff - the book is one source:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/15/eveningnews/main2359540.shtml

Here's the amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Causes-Politics-Americas-Supplement/dp/0767920422/

by pak202 on Jul 20, 2007 5:07 PM EDT reply actions

Thanks!

Interesting stuff.

Regarding the stuff about herbal products, I tend to be a little skeptical about health scares. If you're going to look at adverse events, you have to think in terms of how many people use the products. Even the most basic over-the-counter pain and allergy medicines are associated with millions of adverse events over time.

That doesn't mean some products aren't poorly manufactured or just plain useless. Some might even be dangerous. It's just hard to tell from the news reports if nobody bothers to include the math.

by Lou Schuler on Jul 23, 2007 10:53 AM EDT reply actions