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It's pretty baseless article and it only raises a new question for me, why don't they work?

This argument and the other regarding protein powders not being "real food" stands beyond reason to me. If you're eating vitamins or protein in food or in a pill, what would the difference be? Are smoothies, soups or other processed foods not food?

I take a multivitamin and magnesium supplement, although I take them at the same time as my breakfast (as stated on the label). Logically this makes sense to me, as the contents will be absorbed and digested along with other food stuffs rather than just flushed through the body.

The only way I could imagine multi-vitamins useless and ineffective is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?

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> The only way I could imagine they're useless is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?

Yes. It is what they are bound to and how they are prepared. The idea of "micronutrients" popped up during the mass production of food post-war--(think of all those cereals that were fortified, fortified because all the nutrients had been stripped out during manufacture!)--and went out of vogue in the 70's. This was the idea that you could reduce food (like a steak) to just a bunch of chemicals, eat those chemicals, and have the same outcome as eating a steak. We've learned a lot more. (That's a crass way to describe it, but close enough.)

I am treating bone loss and I take a prescription Vitamin D because the kind found in OTC single- or multivitamins are not biologically available due to their (inexpensive) preparations.

What's the reason why a well prepared one is prescription based and a useless one OTC?

1,000u daily pill vs 50,0000u Weekly Unlikely, but you can Overdose on it.

I have a prescription for it. Still prefer daily pill.

I don't know, and I would like to.

Bear in mind that vitamins and supplements are not regulated by the FDA and manufacturers are largely left to their own devices, with vastly varying results.

For instance, in magnesium supplementation, all sorts of different formations exist -- and they're not particularly well studied. Some of them are pretty much totally ineffective. Here's a good study demonstrating the variability in terms of bioavailability of magnesium from different formulations -- ranging from 0% to 100% of the magnesium contained in the pill actually accessible to the body. [1]

For instance, Nature's Bounty comes out bottom of the pack, pretty much totally useless (19% bioavailable) [2], whereas Magnerot Classic [3] seems to be best in class (90% bioavailable)

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6683096/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Bounty-Magnesium-Supplement-V...

[3] https://www.woerwagpharma.de/de/produkte/produkt/magnerot-cl...

The argument probably is that in various populations certain vitamin deficiencies are so prevalent (e.g. vitamin D in African Americans) that you can pretty much assume that a random person is most likely to be deficient in one or more categories and would benefit from a supplement to fix that.

Of course, that argument is valid only if the supplement would actually fix the prevalent deficiency, as you refer in your example about vitamin D.

So is the fact Sweden puts vitamin D in milk and other foods pointless then ?

Ignoring the problems with this pop article:

> This argument and the other regarding protein powders not being "real food" stands beyond reason to me. If you're eating vitamins or protein in food or in a pill, what would the difference be? Are smoothies or soups not food?

Nutrition studies are quite difficult to perform, and the biology of digestion is not well understood. Certainly different foods eaten in different ways are absorbed by your body differently. Your smoothie example is a good one: fibrous vegetables travel farther through the gut* and their nutrients are absorbed differently than when the fibres are chopped up so that they travel through the lower intestine faster.

> ...The only way I could imagine they're useless is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?

Likewise an iron supplement alone (or just iron from a piece of meat) will not raise iron levels as much as when taken with lemon juice or, yes, vitamin C.

You can measure this effect for yourself by measuring glucose rise when eating various foods: a raw apple, for example, vs the same mass of apple sauce vs the same mass of apple juice.

* of course it all makes its way the same distance from mouth to anus! I mean arriving intact, or less processed, in the lower intestine and spending a longer time there.

Then I guess I'd be happy to take them even if I get "some benefits and nutrients from them", super easy to take, relatively inexpensive and like I said, I do take them with various foods, as you said sometimes nutrients are absorbed best in combination with others, so my logic is sometimes I might have breakfast containing more vitamin C, this day I'll get some extra iron, seems like a win to me?

I'm not a doctor so maybe my views are overly simplistic? Seems like a good insurance policy to me more than anything else. I still strive to eat a healthy diet, but why not cover all bases?

> You can measure this effect for yourself by measuring glucose rise when eating various foods: a raw apple, for example, vs the same mass of apple sauce vs the same mass of apple juice.

Just to be pedantic for a moment, but you'd want to compare same calories (isocaloric), rather than mass per se

I was thinking of the rise time but indeed, your pedantry is appropriate for looking at the peak which will also be different

They only measure clinical outcomes such as cancer or heart attacks. "Multivitamins do not cure cancer" would be a better heading. Or even "30% of Americans taking multivitamins report enhanced quality of life".

> The only way I could imagine multi-vitamins useless and ineffective is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?

And because your body only needs a certain amount, and doesn't benefit from an excess. Water soluble vitamins saturate and the rest is excreted in urine, fat soluble ones build up, potentially to the point of toxicity.

If you already get a sufficient amount from your diet as the overwhelming majority of Americans do, it's just a money sink.

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