Vitamins: Too much of a not-so-good thing?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/health/vitamins-offit/index.html?hpt=hp_c4
This is an interesting issue. Much like the flu vaccine having dubious efficacy (where ‘dubious’ is being kind) over the last couple of decades mega doses of vitamins have been increasingly shown to be bad for your health. Add to that the fact that there is no regulation whatsoever on vitamin supplements (and of course that it is a many billion dollar industry with all the requisite political influence) and it is rather remarkable to me that there haven’t been more deaths. There is medical evidence that mega doses of antioxidants during chemo (don’t get me started on chemo!) can actually blunt the treatment, possibly even make it useless. Patients are specifically counseled to avoid taking vitamin supplements during treatment because of this.
However, there is a huge amount of evidence that people with poor diets (sadly, the majority of the US population, despite access to some of the best food in the world) can benefit a great deal from low-dose supplements. My father-in-law is a doctor in the Philippines (EENT: Ears, Eyes, Nose and Throat; see here for a journal from my first trip if you are interested) and he routinely sees people with very poor nutrition and routinely prescribes for them vitamin supplements. He says he has seen dramatic changes from the supplements and some people (often children, but sometimes adults) who have suffered from life-long health issues shake that all off with a few weeks of vitamin supplements. Not scientific, I know, but based on other research I have read (one of my degrees, btw, is in biochemistry and _nutrition_) a well-balanced supplement at a reasonable dose can have a large impact on people with poor diets. On people with the recommended variety in their diet, not so much. If you eat your greens and regularly pick from the rest of the food groups (sorry to say I generally don’t follow my own advice) then you are getting the required amount of vitamins and minerals to make a body healthy. Regularly eat crap, of course, and you are going to wind up short on some important vitamin, mineral or other nutrient and that can set off a cascade of poor health outcomes that can be so trivially treated.
Too much of anything is not good for you (I have tried to think of an exception to this rule and have yet to come up with one (including money, btw)). Conversely, too little of some things is also not good for you. Moderation in everything!
