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Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

While I agree prisoners aren't treated well, I'm not convinced that vitamin pills are necessarily worth while.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/do-multivitamins-...

"If you take a multivitamin, it's probably because you want to do everything you can to protect your health. But there is still limited evidence that a daily cocktail of essential vitamins and minerals actually delivers what you expect. The latest round of studies, published in December in Annals of Internal Medicine, found no benefit from multivitamins in protecting the brain or heart."

We've seen that deficiencies cause disease, but there seems to be little evidence that vitamin supplement pills prevent it.

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Following up on my own comment, here is an article that talks about 2 placebo-controlled, double-blind studies that found a decrease in violence by adding multivitamin supplements.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry...

So that's pretty good evidence for benefits, and it is certainly a relatively inexpensive intervention.

The article makes it pretty clear that prisoners typically have diseases, and that these diseases are pretty likely caused by malnutrition.

Studies of the benefits of multivitamins for otherwise healthy people aren't really relevant.

Nutritional supplements compete with pharmaceuticals. Could there be a conflict of interest when an institution that is heavily influenced by big pharma puts out a study on their competition? http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2009/10/23/bitter-pills/

That's the Physicians' Health Study. Where the study subjects are physicians, not exactly a demographic at high risk for vitamin deficiencies, compared to prisoners.

I think the point is that many prisoners do have nutritional deficiencies. They aren't getting all the vitamins that most of us do from regular food. Of course providing them with better food would probably be a better solution than crap food plus vitamin supplements.

Dr. Gregor's research has also shown multivitamins are a distraction... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fgVDT0qw88

But these studies are on general population, different from the prison population which is probably undernourished. And the article cites a study on prisoners which shows vitamins (and supplementary fatty acids) reduce violent behavior: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/bjprcpsych/181/1/22.full.pdf

Please, it is completely different. One is a health obsessed person taking a multivitamin cocktail. Other is a person, which someone choose what they eat based on price alone, taking vitamins.

Maybe it would be cheaper just to give them healthier food.

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