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| Introduction: The Issue | Most of us are not deficient in even a single nutrient to the point where it would manifest in a blood test or medical exam! (except for iron, another long debatable story.) What then, is the point of taking vitamins? There are three schools of thought. 1. We get all we need from our food. No doubt, for people with low requirements. 2. Those who maintain that modest supplementation cannot hurt. A wise hedge; 3. Those in search for the optimal daily allowance (the ODA), which is valid, if not elusive. 4. Those who shovel almost anything with a chemical name into their mouths. Another word for this group is life extensioners. They are like group 3 but going for broke! |
Taking vitamin supplements is sort of like
investing. People who insist on not supplementing
probably keep all their money in a wall safe or mattress. People who take one One-a-Day type vitamin (strictly 1x the RDA) probably deep their money in a bank, with a few bonds. People searching for the ODA have a few blue chips, mutual funds, and NASDAQ stocks, and follow the market. |
| My position | I subscribe to groups 2 and more to 3. But, you should
realize that the greatest strides in human longevity so far have been through
simple municipal sanitation procedures and medical techniques (including
vaccinations, although some debate this hotly). So optimal nutrition is not THE
primary issue. Or wasn't. I also sympathize with group 1s point of view, as it does take them out of a certain rat race. But even authors of the RDA acknowledge that normal diets fall somewhat short of some of the RDAs. Which is perhaps why so many of them were lowered in 1989! But I suspect that just as a lot of tobacco executives don't smoke, that many of the authors of the RDA (a fairly large group--several hundred people) also supplement! One has to straddle a pretty narrow fence between the believability of government research, one's own observations and physical experiences, and other interpretations of newer research results. Combined with the need to believe in answers and solutions. People get rich telling you it CAN be done, not that it CANNOT be done. Bearers of bad news risk personal harm, be it in medieval Rome, or in a modern research group! |
People who wildly supplement probably would buy penny stocks, commodities and futures, and follow every hot tip they can. And, in looking for the hot stock or hot nutrient and its therapeutic amounts, your chance of "scoring" hinge on the probability of your local nutritional pundit or stockbroker. And how many people have lost money with stockbrokers? Aren't they supposed to "know"? |
| The RDA: It's all we got! | First, let's talk about the RDA, essentially the
Gub'ment's opinion on what constitutes good nutrition. Like it or not, in terms
of a "standard", it's all we got! Sooner or later, we (and maybe the
Gub'ment) will evolve to an ODA, or an optimal daily allowance. The very
concept of supplementing or megadosing is an attempt to ferret out ODA's. The
real issue is, how would one ever tell when they reached it? Tough question. While some suggest ulterior motives, industry pressure, or plain incompetence in the RDA determination, it is still an impressive effort. You should realize that the data used to compile each RDA comprises millions upon millions of dollars of effort, from biochemical, medical, epidemiological, and other methods. I would gut-guesstimate that the total dollar value of input into the RDA is billions of dollars, spanning decades of research. Which doesn't necessarily make it true! But it is all we have, and no one yet has died a precipitous death adhering to the RDA--or from drinking coffee! The other issue for those in quest of their own ODA, how do you know when you have reached it? Especially when the biochemical tests for ODAs do not yet exist, except for ONE B vitamin, and even that has epistemological problems. The answer is, know thyself, and listen for changes. I will talk about examples of people, including myself, using various methods to determine what would seem to be optimal doses. |
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| Be wary of advice | One of the things I hate is when people talk about
vitamins, and go through this knowledgeable-sounding glib litany of This vitamin
is good for this, this vitamin is important for that, blah blah blah. Over and
over again. I could never remember any of that stuff before I went to school,
and I can barely remember it now. It makes no sense. In one sense, everything
is good for everything! And this is not glibness. The folly of vitamins for
your hair, for your libido, for this, for that, boils down to one thing: a
suitable multivitamin. But you know the marketing analogy to divide and
conquer: Differentiate and profit! Also, next time some hot shot know-it-all nutrition guru blithers on and on, ask him to draw the structure of vitamin C, or that of its closest precursor (which happens to be glucose). If he can't, you are taking advice from a mechanic who can't drive a car! Not an impossibility, but something to consider. |
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| Basic Strategies | But for now, we will talk about very basic strategies, but
very important one's, for supplementation. Rule #1: Become familiar with the RDAs for vitamins and minerals. Speaking now only of vitamins (minerals to follow), your supplementation should generally be in ratios of the RDAs. Thus, when you look on the label, the "% RDA should read the same for approximately all nutrients, and should be under 1,000 % (10x RDA). C and E are exceptions, as they are highly non-toxic, so you be disproportionate. Vit A should not be over 25,000 (5x RDA) units, period, or B-6 over 25 mg (already over 10x RDA). You also want the % RDA to be closer to 100% so you can take a few tablets during the course of the day. Although 10x RDA may be OK once, 1x the RDA taken 5x during the day is undoubtedly more effective, even though a lower total amount. Minerals should not be supplemented beyond 1 or 2x the RDA, especially iron. I recommend taking a multimineral without iron, if you can find one. Trace minerals, like Boron and Vanadium, Silica, etc. Don't know much about them. Neither does anyone else. Probably won't hurt in microgram amounts, but I wouldn't pay extra for them. |
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| The Myth of Balanced Formulas: | So-called Balanced 50, 75 and 100 formulas are so contrary
to the most basic nutritional principles....an analogy would be to buy 5 gallons
of gloss for your room trim, and 5 gallons for the rest of the room. Excuse me,
but is there not some relationship between trim footage and the total square
footage? Ratios are the name of the game in nutrition, and these types of "balanced formulas" completely violate the rules. Avoid them like the plague. |
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| Be wary of: | The incessant heralding of bio-availability is largely irrelevant--and bogus You will never realize how bogus all of these claims are, until you do research work in the biological/chemical sciences. Mainly because they are so difficult to determine! And expensive! It costs tens of thousands of dollars to do the simplest absorption study, in terms of the chief researchers time, if nothing else. And believe, these researchers do not research for free! They are as obsessed with money as any businessman! Realize that you are, in one fell swoop, taking at least a whole day's vitamins. And you are worried about absorption? Speed of absorption? Give me a break. This is another hustle by people who not only should know better, but couldn't care less about the details. If anything makes sense, it would be a timed release of supplemental nutrients. This is a good idea, but I would also doubt anyone's claims for this. Just how, chemically, do you reliably time release a compound from within the gut? No one has ever explained this to me satisfactorily. Be wary of modified structures of vitamins: complexes (not B complex), esters, etc. What I do? I buy the cheapest stuff available. Period. It is my opinion that the various claims made for these invariably moe expensive products are among the biggest ripoffs around. |
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