Could you elaborate on that? I thought that taking vitamin supplements without a recommendation from a doctor is just a way to have very expensive piss. Most of the things that get in, are removed from the body without being absorbed.
Granted that might not be the best source, I reflected on that and the chemistry makes sense.
Vitamins primarily will leach out via osmosis. Osmosis works by gradients. This probably means an exponential decay of absorption relative to concentration and as you consume more, your body will waste progressively more and uptake will be less efficient per unit mass.
But it's not boolean/binary - your body doesn't suddenly stop everything after an arbitrary cutoff.
There's an elegance to this - it means there is a lot of leeway in consumption so it is hard to overdose. But it also means that if you "need" to increase bioavailability of a water soluble vitamin, you can simply consume more orally and it will increase. It just becomes progressively more wasteful to do via that means. (IV is more efficient in this manner)
So I suppose wasteful is not the same as pointless/useless
00:29:32 - In the Philippines, every standard deviation increase in serum vitamin D was associated with an 8 times more likely chance to have a mild rather than severe COVID-19 outcome and a 20 times more likely chance to have a mild rather than critical outcome.
00:30:37 - In Indonesia, 98.9% of patients with vitamin D deficiency died, 88% of patients with vitamin D insufficiency died but only 4% of patients with sufficient vitamin D died.
Alipio, Mark, Vitamin D Supplementation Could Possibly Improve Clinical Outcomes of Patients Infected with Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) (April 9, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3571484 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3571484
Raharusun, Prabowo and Priambada, Sadiah and Budiarti, Cahni and Agung, Erdie and Budi, Cipta, Patterns of COVID-19 Mortality and Vitamin D: An Indonesian Study (April 26, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3585561 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3585561
See https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-...
As far as if that means you take that as a multi-vitamin pill vs D3 supplements alone I guess is up to the individual. But either option only costs a few dollars/pounds. Maybe I was a little loose with language saying multi-vitamin.
But sure, you could be extra sure that your Vit-D/Zinc/Mg (and other vitamins) levels are low by going to the doctor now, doing an exam and waiting for the results to come back.
Or you could go through your diet and estimate your nutritional intake and see if anything is missing (a lot of apps do that calculation)
With the caveat that (word of mouth, not researched) the FDA recommendations on vitamin D are substantially too low.
Calcium absorption is one of the trickier vitamins to get tight.
If you’re taking vitamins specifically because you’re deficient, make sure you’re eating complimentary foods with them.
If you have a normal diet and you have deficiencies, don't just look to supplements.
What I do after working out (say 4x/week) or after hard day in the mountains during weekends is to take 1/2 a tablet of multivitamin after big meal. So around 5-7x/week. That tablet has 100% of all the vitamins and 30% of the minerals.
So I get 50% of vitamins, 15% of the minerals with a lot of fluids and fats, after proper effort on the body. This mix should be helping the body regenerate all the damage done by the workout. I can't get any overdose or even come close to it, unless I would be eating some very specific food like some seafood (and then overdose would come from it anyway, regardless of multivitamins).
The multivitamins I buy (cheap Swiss ones) are cca 3.5$ per 20 tablets, giving the price per dosage/piss somewhere around 8 cents. I certainly have much more expensive pissing activities even from cheapest beers, sodas (which I don't generally drink) or basically any liquid apart from tap water.
In the UK doctors recommend everyone takes a vitamin D supplement in the winter.
There's a consensus statement from 2010, here: https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Summerhealth/Documents/Concensus...
And there's discussion of the new guidelines (with links to the newer research) here: https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/the-new-guidelines-on-...
Yes, unless you have good reason to think you have a deficiency, supplements are a waste of time and money. And even if you do have reason to think you might have a deficiency there are often better (usually dietary) ways to address it.
You can get higher quality vitamins with forms that are more easily absorbed, for example chelated magnesium instead of magnesium oxide.
That said, I thought the evidence actually pointed to higher all cause mortality in people who take vitamins.
Citation absolutely needed
The caveat is excessive consumption of Vitamin A (and maybe others), in some specific circumstances. Keyword: excessive
My hypothesis would be that healthy people don't take vitamins because they never saw the need, putting already sick people in the second category. I doubt that taking vitamins can actually do much harm in low doses.
First result: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111010173019.h...
>After adjustment, use of multivitamins, vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc and copper, were all associated with increased risk of death in the study population.
The top three links showed association between beta carotene supplementation and risk of death.
A little further down, a study showing "higher plasma concentrations of vitamin B12 were associated with a 25% increased adjusted risk of all-cause mortality per 1-SD increase" https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
>The use of multivitamins overall was associated with 2.4% increased absolute risk for death (hazard ratio [HR], 1.06; 95% confidence interval, 1.02 - 1.10).
https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20us....
The conclusion I personally draw from all this is: don't take a multi vitamin. Don't take any vitamins unless I have a good reason like a tested deficiency. If I think I could benefit from a supplement then I try to increase it in my diet instead.
If you read that link you'll see the findings for iron and calcium were replicated. (Not to mention this article is basically referencing a different article which is somewhere else, so we're missing the context)
The B12 issue, as the own article mentions, is not necessarily connected to a dietary excess consumption
> Participants within the highest quartile of vitamin B12 plasma concentrations (>455.41 pg/mL) were more likely to be older and have higher BMI and blood pressure.
OK so that's one mineral they called out from a long list that includes multi vitamins, B6, and magnesium, very common recommendations. What about the rest?
Point taken about the B12 study.
What about https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/751462#:~:text=The%20us...