The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Doesn't seem like that's quite the same thing.
Personally, I take omega 3, vitamin D (gelcaps, it's fat-soluble), and kelp (for iodine) daily. That article doesn't say much about those.
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_weller_could_the_sun_be_goo...
Disclaimer: not able to watch the video
This can be verified with blood tests.
Vitamin D supplements (at normal daily doses) are recommended.
This is especially important for pregnant women and children under 5. Also for people with limited access to sun ('cultural dress' for example.)
http://www.thelocal.se/32862/20110328/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-a...
BTW, as you get older, your body loses the ability to convert sunlight to Vitamin D. Of course no one who reads HN would have this issue :-)
That little bit of meat and vegetables will contain vitamins.
Those vitamins are a crucial part of a normal diet.
There's also a difference between not being deficient in vitamin D, and having the optimal amount of vitamin D available. People tend to confuse the two, as if as soon as you aren't deficient you can't possibly improve on that.
Assuming anything meaningful happened there, that was almost certainly the magnesium. Magnesium is linked with sleep improvements (actually, literally today a Google Alerts told me about such an experiment: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3703169/ ).
(Vitamin D, on the other hand, probably not so much since it sounds like you gave it to him in the evening, where, at least for me, vitamin D screws up my sleep http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#vitamin-d-at-night-hurts .)
Your site is amazing by the way.
When were you taking it?
i have ms and vitamin d is suspected to be important in reducing the chance of suffering from that disease (it's an immunomodulator - has some connection with your immune system - and ms is basically your immune system attacking your own nerves). other risk factors include being a woman, and having had glandular fever or chickenpox (or both). i am prescribed quite high doses (about double what i see as recommended for supplements). i understand that, along with the medication i take, it helps reduce further outbreaks.
i found it kind of weird that this kind of knowledge is still ongoing research. seems like the kind of thing people would have worked out by now.
anyway, consider getting a little sun each day (according to http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Summerhealth/Pages/vitamin-D-sunl... you don't need long), and maybe a supplement in winter, if you're in the north.
1) People born in northern latitude areas (europe, USA), who then move at a young age close to the equator.
2) People who live their whole lives in an area close to the equator
3) People who were born and raised in areas close to the equator then moved to northern latitudes in adulthood.
Compare to people who are more suspectible to MS:
1) People are born in areas close to the equator then move at an early age to northern latitudes
2) People who live their whole lives in northern latitudes
3) People who live their childhood in northern latitudes then move to the equator.
So there is a correlation between growing up, regardless of what happens in adulthood, near the equator (maybe from Vit D dosage) and having a lower risk for MS. Cool stuff.
I doubt that those vitamins are doing you much harm, but I honestly doubt that you are getting much real benefit from them either (unless you have a real, medical deficiency). But hey, taking them probably makes you feel safer, so you'll likely keep taking them regardless.
Interestingly, the age of a person is usually the best indicator of which vitamins they will take - people often get snagged into some 'holy grail' vitamin (free radicals being the newest) and then continue to take them because accepting that what you've been paying for over years is a waste of money is very hard to take.
> I honestly doubt that you are getting much
> real benefit from them either (unless you have
> a real, medical deficiency)
And on the 'real, medical deficiency' front, there are many debates as to what optimum levels are for some vitamins and minerals. Nutrition is the one area where some things seem very unsettled (e.g. All fat is bad! No wait only some fat is bad! No wait eating fat doesn't necessarily make you fat! etc). [ And even then a real, medical deficiency may just mean that your body is degrading vs. operating efficiently. E.g. maybe taking Vitamin X will help your body digest and absorb food better, but you don't need it to keep living so there is no real, medical deficiency. ]
[1] Used Portland as an example, because I remember reading about this.
"someone, somewhere at some time was pushing them as an amazing cure"
I've also heard a GP (who I personally respect) say they prescribe Vitamin D as a convenient placebo for common fatigue-type symptoms.
(http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vitamins-minerals/Pages/Vitamin...)
That GP should be reported. They're not following NICE guidelines for CFS, and they are failing their patients. It's easy to mock people with chronic fatigue and laugh about sending them away with a placebo, but that's abuse and should be stopped. That GP clearly doesn't want to treat them, which isn't fine but understandable. But that's why we now have primary mental health teams to refer people onto.
(http://publications.nice.org.uk/chronic-fatigue-syndromemyal...)
Nobody was laughing about it or mocking: we were discussing medical ethics quite seriously, and the medical value of placebo.
As I understood, the GP only applied this to situations where by-the-book they would have to send people away unmedicated and dissatisfied.
Although you might reasonably disagree with their methods, the GP felt quite strongly about it: believing that showing care in such a simple, non-harmful way early led to fewer chronic cases.
I didn't state my reasons for taking them and you have no idea what they are. This is a strawman.
> one takes those vitamins because someone, somewhere at some time was pushing them as an amazing cure. A couple studies were done, data was likely cherry picked, and now one pays money to some company to give it to them. That company makes very sure that beneficial studies are done as often as possible.
Why would somebody want to eat free radicals? Do you mean antioxidants, which are supposed to destroy free radicals?
I take Vitamin D personally because a blood test showed that I was Vitamin D deficient and my doctor recommended that I take 1000 I.U. of Vitamin D daily to bring myself up to a non-deficient state.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...
Particularly, it breaks each supplement down by effect, for example, it lists Antioxidants far negative for 'mortality' (per the article), but positively for 'infertility in men'. It also cites sources.
Perhaps, judging by the article, they should have a 'harmful' ranking as well.
By this chart, Vitamin D makes sense for 'general health' (I have gotten it recommended for immune system issues like allergies), and Omega 3 for 'heart disease' seem like winners. I didn't see Iodine on there.
The question of 'what supplement' seems incomplete without 'for what purpose'.
Also, the ending of the article destroys its credibility. The author is no less an intellectual hack than the people he writes about.
Maybe certain vitamins (and pseudo-vitamins like vitamin D3) have a threshold response, that is, you only need a certain amount of it in your body for it to function properly, and adding any more will not make you any healthier (overdosing on vitamins can be fatal, so you can't just up the dosage).
That doesn't mean more is better. There is no evidence to indicate that the general population taking multi-vitamins helps anything.
In summary, many of the studies that have shown scary correlations like "multivitamins increase mortality" are (according to the author) based on inappropriate (but easy to apply) statistical models. Scientists are too-often not trained well enough in how to evaluate the model they are using to see if it is appropriate for the task, and peer review boards often do not include statisticians.
A simple summary of how this can apply to vitamin supplements: suppose you do a trial where you give different groups different doses of a vitamins and then monitor their health. Most vitamins are detrimental to have too little of, helpful to have the right amount of, and then increasingly detrimental to have too much of. The graph of their benefit/harm would be a curve starting at a low number, curving up to a high peak, and then dropping down to lower and lower numbers off to infinity. If you fit this graph to a line, you'll see a downward slope, giving an indication like "multivitamins increase mortality rates".
My personal experience is that older folks (>65) get stuck more firmly than younger folks. It is especially sad when someone you care about deeply believes so strongly in a reality that exists only for them.
Did you not read the thread on HN just this week full of 911 truthers?
You mean like the US head of conter-terrorism and the secretary of transportation? Or several of the 9/11 commission members themselves?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...
But a year ago there was a large, randomized, double-blind study (not something most of these studies can claim) that measured a regular dose multivitamin, not huge megadose supplements that tend to focus on one or two compounds. The result showed 8% fewer cancers. The subjects were all men and were all doctors, so one could infer that they were much healthier than average. I've been taking a simple multivitamin since. I wouldn't be shocked to learn in ten years that I'm doing the wrong thing, but this is the most convincing study I've seen in any direction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/health/daily-multivitamin-...
Focus on a healthy, balanced diet and make sure you include enough variety focusing on plenty of colorful vegetables, fruits and nuts. Exercise regularly and take good care of your body getting enough sleep and enough sunshine.
Is that not enough?
At that point many people are keen to see great benefits from placebos, and the door to quack medicine is open.
The demand for "good looking" food is higher than the demand for healthy food. The food grown in Cuba is probably healthier since the farmers can't afford the more expensive, modern farming techniques.
This is made worse by the fact that there do exist people for whom supplements are required. Without justification, everyone thinks they fall in that group.
I'm mostly vegan, and I tend to just try to focus on eating a good diet, but I do also try to supplement with things that are harder to find in my diet naturally: some kelp for iodine, B-12 since I don't eat much eggs (or meat for that matter).
I recently ordered some D3 spray, for reasons I can't really remember. Every now and then I go online and try to learn as much as I can about the research and make a judgement call.
A balanced diet is enough, but it's hard to know what "balanced" really means in this world where our food system has been so skewed towards processed foods and meat.
Nothing is ever enough these days. People that exercise 5 to 7 times a week used to be considered healthy by all: now they are called "active couch potatoes" or something like that by some people if they also happen to have some sedentary hobbies when they are not working out. Recent studies have shown sitting a lot to be unhealthy in the long run: just sitting! Regardless of whether the person is active or not.
It feels like there is almost nothing that you're doing right, if you're living in the modern world. It's like we benefit from the actual services of a modern civilization greatly, but also suffer greatly from working and supporting that very same civilization (as opposed to a primitive one). I guess we ideally should all be working at standing workstations, rotated with a treadmill workstation because evidently standing too much also hurts you, and then in our leisure time we should spend it on some games/activities that boils down to jumping through the hoops that our ill-fitted-for-modern-civilization bodies and minds need to live a healthy life in a modern context.
Sorry 'bout the rant.
It's not clear cut like that.
Farming nowadays produce crops with 2/3 of the vitamins you used to get, due to exhausted soil [1]. Wild salmon has 33% more Omega-3 than the ones grown in tanks [2].
Even if you manage a 100% fresh/unprocessed food (unlikely nowadays), you still ingest less vitamins than your parents did.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soil-deplet...
Here is another similar site: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/display/substance
Reading this article reminds me of trying to have technical bio-medical conversations with doctors. They blow me off and give me the same baby talk they give all their other patients. That's the way the author of this article writes, broad baby talk generalizations. It's the reaction I'd imagine I'd get if I tried to have a conversation about digital signal encoding with my cable TV installer. They don't care, it's not their job, it's not important and they just do their job the way they do it for everybody and get paid either way.
Doctors themselves aren't necessarily scientists nor researchers, and in practicality it's hard to have that kind of wide depth of knowledge when you're supposed to be a 'general' physician anyway. The problem arises from our culture which turns everything doctors say into a holy tautology that dominates public discourse (without actually understanding the matter), to the point where it doesn't even matter what scientific research comes up with, because "those scientists never make up their minds anyway"... sigh.
It's when you realize that even a rudimentary understanding of the scientific process would avoid that kind of misunderstanding, that it puts into perspective how sad our situation is. This is largely thanks to the media and not individual people themselves, but it's still quite annoying to say the least.
But even without that, if people subsequently understood the role and limitations of doctors, such critical self-research wouldn't be so rare anymore anyway. A doctor's role is like that of a consulting company with you as the client: you're always going to be better suited to understand your problem domain, a doctor will just serve as a guide to make sure everything makes sense and will then help you implement a solution. Or well, that would be the ideal case anyway. I know I've had my fair share of poor doctors too.
The article seems to focus on them as cures - which they are not. Saying that a vitamin is a cure for anything is like saying a loaf of bread is a cure.
Vitamins are fuel - the more intense activities you do, the more you use them.
IF you have a good diet, you don't need multivitamins/supplements. But if you have a homogenous diet (eat the same thing every day and nothing else), then vitamins and supplements are much more useful than harmful.
Moreover, no matter what diet you have, if you do bodybuilding or intensive physical or mental exertion, vitamins and minerals from supplements are almost a must.
It's like using normal fuel vs jet fuel - no matter how good your bioreactor (stomach) is, it just cannot extract all the vitamins and minerals you need for that kind of exertion.
Most bodybuilders know that a dose of pure protein powder is much more effective for muscle building than any amount of meat or cheese. Same goes for glutamine and other supplements, and of course vitamins.
The article also focuses on megadoses - well, no s#@t, a megadose of anything is bad for you. 3 grams of vitamin C per day is batshit insane in my book - 500-1000mg is more than enough.
But don't just take what I said at face value. Like Einstein said, don't trust everything you read on the Internet - check with several different sources, read some research abstracts before making up your mind and storing ANY information as true in your brain.
This is exactly what the article is contesting, but I think the confusion is mostly a semantic one. If "vitamin" means "molecules necessary for good health" then you are right. If "vitamin" means the typical molecules found in multivitamins then the science supports the article's claim.
If you get a cheap multivitamin that doesn't actually contain the real stuff, well that's a whole other problem.
Vitamins aren't an energy source. They're not burned up.
> if you do bodybuilding or intensive physical or mental exertion, vitamins and minerals from supplements are almost a must.
No they're not. You've been listening to too many bros.
> Most bodybuilders know that a dose of pure protein powder is much more effective for muscle building than any amount of meat or cheese
Most bodybuilders are clueless bros that don't actually read scientific research. Yes, the bioavailability of whey protein powder may be higher than other protein sources but there is very little evidence to suggest it's "much" more effective for building muscle. Possibly more effective before and after a workout, not at other times. There isn't much research into it outside of the workout window either.
> Same goes for glutamine and other supplements, and of course vitamins.
Nope, nope, and nope. There's absolutely no scientific evidence that glutamine is helpful to bodybuilders.
He said "Americans have the most expensive urine in the world."
I wouldn't trust a doctor compared to a bunch of eggheads who studied vitamin fanatics. Doctors are constantly misinterpreting studies. (Not to say I don't either.)
"Nearly nine in ten multi-supplement users consumed 20 or more different kinds of supplements throughout the year... The results of the study are startling. Instead of anticipated side effects and overdosage, researchers found the following:"
* Vitamin E levels among multi-supplement users were more than double that of non-users and multivitamin users.
* Risk for diabetes was 73% less, coronary heart disease 52% less..
* Blood serum levels of carotenoids (beta carotene, lycopene, lutein) were three higher among multi-supplement users than non-users, and double that of multivitamin users.
Except for the blood serum levels, I concede most of this does not counter your argument of correlation vs. causation.
One crazy week I forgot to take my daily multivitamin a couple times - then I realized that the week was more headache-free.
So I stopped taking it entirely and now I very rarely get headaches.
As a control I tried taking it again and even another brand and headaches came back.
The correct way to prove it would be a double blind test using placebos. ie not something you could prove on your own.
Chances are you don't need it, and I think the body is really good at snatching up things it needs when that pill rolls by.
(I worried about the kidney/etc burden of daily excess, but the idea that daily excess could spur excess in the form of cancer does not surprise.)
This market is truly caveat emptor.
My stats professor refused to read any pop-sci articles of this kind. His thesis was that bad statistics permeates the "lower sciences" (his words, not mine) and that just devolves into gibberish when it hits the mainstream.
If you get a bunch of random people, give some these high doses of vitamins and give some a placebo, the ones getting the vitamins did worse.
Some people (children under 5; pregnant women; etc) will need supplements, and many people benefit from Vitamin D supplements.
It's every bit as important, in my opinion, to not eat killer foods, as it is to eat vegetables. That is, a neutral effect alone would be enough to show dramatic health improvements. This is where the pro vitamin arguments went wrong from day one.
Water isn't a miracle elixir that cures cancer. Strip out all high fructose corn syrup and sugar from all American beverages, and the equivalent conclusion would be to suggest that water cures obesity, diabetes and cancer (when in fact the absence of sugar and HFCS is what's doing the trick).
Also, telling me that people took vitamins without showing me their specific day to day diets and exercise routines, is absurdity to put it very mildly. Dietary input and exercise is radically more important than the vitamins in the health outcomes.
Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.
I guess I myself was deluded to think that these "titans" are some how superior in every way to "the rest of us."
Some vitamins and vitamin analoques do have legitimate benefits as medication but best leave the dosing to a qualified health professional. Much better to eat a balanced diet with lots of vegetables, fruit and some whole protein. And get some sun in moderation if the climate supports it.
5-HTP daily? I hope you have a spare heart on hand!
From my understanding, you can take ECCG with 5-HTP to help prevent some of the heart damage serotonin in your blood causes, but even then. There is no reason to take 5-HTP daily, a small dose every 3 or 4 days should suffice!
- Oxygen - Power, Sex, Suicide
If you want a fascinating, very readable, well laid out argument against the entire notion of antioxidant supplementation (as well as a fascinating, technical but not too technical, pop-sci read) these are it.
tl;dr: Ingested antioxidants have no way to target the specific area in mitochondria where the damage would take place, and even if they did, it would probably be negative because free radicals are an essential cell signaling mechanism that aids in weeding out damaged cells.
Also, the author of this article, Paul Offit, is has serious credibility and corruption problems beyond writing articles designed to mislead people.
He has previously claimed that it is perfectly safe for children to take "10,000 vaccines at once" (and originally he claimed 100,000 but reduced it when it was questioned). Even understanding the benefits of vaccines, there are trade offs with them and it is certainly not safe to take 10,000 at once. Offit holds a $1.5 million dollar research chair which is funded by Merck. He also sold the right to his future royalties of a vaccine he developed for $182 million, of which he received around $46 million for a rotavirus vaccine. This was interesting since he had previously pushed this vaccine during his job at the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was a serious conflict of interest that ended up making him quite rich.
Here is an interesting investigative report into Offit's conflicts of interest and hiding of financial relationships.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/cbsnews_investigat...
10,000 is probably 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the number of different vaccines available on any market, so attacking or defending that number has no utility. And commenting as if that were my point detracts from the conversation.
It's much more interesting to think about how his work likely saves hundreds of lives each day, and to contemplate what we can do in our own lives to have such a great impact at such a large scale.
Every vaccine contains several grams of fluid.
10,000 injected into your body all at once would kill you.
I'm like 99% sure that like 99% of what's injected into you when you get a vaccine is some sort of filler like a saline solution, or a preservative like that good old mercury based one that everyone used to bitch about. So it's quite likely in my mind that you could formulate some sort of "everything vaccine" with a sufficient quantity of dead viruses or virus parts from 10,000 different viruses, and fit it into a single, normal-sized syringe.
In Australia the immunisation schedule includes (at the age of 2,4 and 6 months) 8 vaccines, one of which includes 13 valencies (13v pneumococcal pneumoniae). This is effectively 20 vaccines at the same time due to the 13 bacterial components included in pneumovax.
You are right in that not only is it standard of care (ie, not dangerous) but it is less traumatic to have them all at once (8 vaccines is 5 needles and a syrup for rotavirus, the addition of which decreased paediatric hospital admissions in Australia by 100,000 pa). Above all else, it is actually more effective to deliver multiple vaccines at once. More antigens seem to generate a stronger immune response, not in 'severity', as in, possibility of severe reaction, but in seroconversion and decreased need for additional later vaccines.
The second paragraph rightfully questions the integrity of the author based on past deceptive statements made in a similar capacity. It also points out a legitimate conflict of interest. Neither of these are ad hominem.
If a police officer is found to commit perjury or otherwise tamper with evidence on one case, We the people find just cause with all of their cases.
The same goes for powerful people whom sit on drug panels in a company whilst holding a federal position requiring drugs. Because he held a dire conflict of interest, I do not see how we can trust him.
Here's Wikipedia's version of the vitamin C controversy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Molecular_medici...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright's_disease
Another good example of misleading information is the last sentence: "In 1994, Linus Pauling died of prostate cancer."
He left out the part where he was 93 at the time of his death (1901-1994). Both the incidence and mortality rate for those over 80 are very high.
http://www.medinfographics.com/cancer-statistics/prostate-ca...
p.s. I do agree with the author in that I do believe taking Vitamins is largely unnecessary if you are eating a healthy diet w/lots of vegetables, legumes and fruit. :)
I think this claim needs justification. Just because it feels true is not enough.
Second, here is what I recall about Dr Offit's chain of reasoning.
1. You need some amount of virus particles to provoke the
immune reaction, call it 1 million. (I'm too lazy to
try to google the numbers myself.)
2. You need some amount of immune cells of the various
types to carry out the immune reaction which results in
immunity, call it 10 million.
3. You have a total of 1 trillion of these immune cells in
your body. (Once again, I'm making up the exact
numbers.)
4. So therefore, the capacity of the immune system is
sufficient to deal with
1 trillion / 10 million = 100,000 vaccines at once.
Dr Offit's point wasn't "Nah, let's give them 10,000 vaccines!" It was that when you go from 1 vaccine to 7 vaccines, you're increasing the load on your immune system from 0.01% to 0.07% and we've all got better things to worry about than that.
And, of course, natural vitamins are necessity. Children die from malnutrition without them.