Vitamins

What I always find kind of odd is the convergence of small, local organic food store/co-ops and phoney snake oil vitamin dispenseries. Sure, it seems kind of obvious since a lot of the same people who are into healthy eating and organic produce are also into a lot of new age "health" bullcrap. But the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand and are actually in many ways in conflict.

If you eat a reasonablly healthy diet that regularly includes vegetables and fruits, you have no need of special vitamin suplements. And the idea that you can extract out the health chemical from a natural food and jam it into your body in massive doses in pill form is, well, kind of corporate for the food co-op world, if you think about it.

Also, I wonder how the placebeo worked. You should know immediately if you are slipped a multivitaman because your pee will turn deep orange.

You should know immediately if you are slipped a multivitaman because your pee will turn deep orange.

As a non-vitamin-popping English friend once told me, "Americans have the most expensive urine in the world."

Kevin,

You confuse multivitamins with megavitamin dosages. There are hundreds of studies showing remarkable results from taking megadoses of vitamins and other supplements. For those skeptics who claim that vitamins simply result in expensive urine suspend your closed minds and read a few abstracts at www.vitasearch.com.

This week alone showed a study that folic acid REGRESSSES carotid plaque. If this was a patent medication every paper in the country would have this on the front page (with a little help from the marketing dept at a big pharma company) but since there are no monopoly profits to be gained it's utterly ignored.

It's sad that even sophisticated folks who read this blog are brainwashed by MSM propaganda.

Kevin - see the commenter a couple of comments up. A number of studies point to a very important role for Vitamin D in preventing a number of diseases, including cancer, MS, etc..., especially in higher latitudes where people tend to have chronic Vitamin D deficiency. The most striking was a study a couple of years ago that involved a randomized clinical trial in the U.K. where women were given either a dose of Vitamin D and Calcium daily or a placebo. even though the goal of the study was to test supplementation as a means of increasing bone density, they also found that the group that had received the treatment showed a 60% reduction in incidence of cancers over a 5-year period.

A lot more research needs to be done to establish effects, mechanisms, and necessary dosage for this type of protective effects, but it's very promising. And if you're wondering about multivitamins, the 400 IU dose they typically carry is pitifully small relative to the levels needed to keep blood concentrations at "natural levels". Supplementation in these studies is usually in the 1000s of IUs per day.

Sadly, Vitamin D supplements are dirt-cheap (literally) to make, so it's definitely not in the pharma industry's interests to look into this, and, indeed, they have an interest in suppressing any promising findings.