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Comment by dundarious | Hacker News Reader

Would it not be more accurate to say, “they must be avoided in vitamin supplement form”?

In general, supplements should not be taken without good reason, because their availability in concentrated form makes it very easy to consume too much, like is also the case for refined sugar.

Consuming too much of anything that is useful in small quantities, is either useless or harmful.

When restricted to the same small quantities that are normally available from natural sources, there are no significant differences between vitamins from supplements and from their natural sources.

There may be good reasons to use supplements, as long as their dosage is right. For instance, eating one raw red bell pepper per day will provide enough vitamin C for a human. However, the same amount of ascorbic acid powder costs ten times less where I live, in Europe. So either taste or budget may make the supplement preferable, which is fine, unless a much greater daily intake is used than it would have been provided by the bell pepper.

This - the overconsumption of supplements can lead to problems. The problem isn't so much with a daily multivitamin as it is with megadoses of a bunch of different vitamins. I know it's only anecdotal, but I had a cousin that really got into one of those vitamin selling pyramid schemes. She got to the point she was taking dozens of different supplements every day and was one of the top sellers. She got cancer and died while only in her 30's. This has been decades ago and I don't remember which cancer she had, but I do remember friends and family wondering if taking all those supplements was a factor? Subsequent research suggests perhaps so. Like I said, she was mega dosing - she wasn't just taking a daily multivitamin.

I have been, not sure if it counts as megadosing, but let's it does, megadosing D3 and C. I have struggled with common skin HPV that would not go away for over 3 years. Modest supplement doses did nothing, but when I increased D3 to 6,000 IU, C to 1.5g and started eating garlic, the warts just started disappearing on their own after some 2 weeks - including the most difficult ones (previously that would require freezing and even that could not eliminate some warts after multiple sessions at the doc). As far as I'm aware all of those are antioxidants. I guess that the invalid cell cleanup and virus cleanup are different mechanisms, but maybe just a guess - that if the immune system is too weak to clean up HPV on its own, it may also be more prone to let a cancer cell slip, maybe I would be better off to continue megadosing those... This kinda makes it a tough call. The thing about sugar is kinda related between the 2 - there's this study about how eating large amounts of sugar in one take will mess with the tumor cleanup mechanism - I noticed that I would often get more new warts after holidays when I consumed a lot of sugar.

lol I bet that works, you can also rub garlic directly on warts and other skin issues I’ve been helped by that in the last. On a separate note, 6,000 IU of d3 is nowhere near a megadose lmao, the study that supposed that it’s dangerous was wrong due to a typo, doses of 50,000 IU over 6mo have been tested and found to be safe. I personally take around 10-15k daily depending on sun exposure and once a week take 30k IUs, along with other things. I would recommend experimenting with 10k daily dose at least if you’re willing to check it out :)

I was just trying to say that healthy diets are still healthy, and that this study does not implicate healthy foods in the same way that it implicates supplements, which I agree, are generally either unnecessary or unhealthy, with a few special cases.

I was also just making this point of clarification for other people, and not implying that a reasonable reading of your post would determine you thought otherwise.

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