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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient.

Sure. But the vast majority of people are not deficient. 86% of Americans take vitamins or supplements of some sort. 21% have been diagnosed with kind of vitamin deficiency. And the vast majority of those could, to your point, eat more lettuce. [1]

"Most people have no need to take vitamins and are wasting their money on supplements that are unlikely to improve their health and may actually harm it." [1]

If you aren't deficient, you may end up with an excess of fat soluble vitamins (A, D) which may actually poison you.

[1] https://osteopathic.org/2019/01/16/poll-finds-86-of-american...

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Deficiencies disparately impact minorities and poor people. And when I was a student even I could not afford that Bell pepper. 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are real people.

If you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose? Talking about excess I hear the medical professional disdain for vitamins in that. Understandably, because they get those people who take extreme doses of over the counter stuff in their visiting hours. But that's no risk to use as an argument against vitamin supplementation for regular use. Multivitamins would be banned if regular use caused overdose.

Totally, and those people may need multivitamins, but that's my point.

Further, "if you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose?" -- vitamin and mineral supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and vary widely by brand and batch and so on.

FDA recommends 700IU for an average adult. The first bottle of multivitamin I found, "Sundown Multivitamin Gummies" has 800IU, which is additive with your diet. 4000IU is the upper limit (and 60,000IU per day has been shown to cause toxicity) I've seen people chow down on those gummies because they're tasty. Not likely to hit, though.

The first Vitamin D supplement (Forest Leaf D3) I found is a once-weekly 50,000IU hum-dinger that provides on average double the safe upper limit.

Lastly, if folks at the poverty line are taking these sometimes expensive, often unnecessary supplements, could that money be better spent on other things?

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