

Vitamins Are a Waste of Money–And They're Not Helping You, Anyway - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/vitamin-bs/386126/?single_page=true

======
stolio
Here's the pith:

> "At the base of it, we do need those 13 vitamins. If you don’t have enough
> of them, you’ll die in often quite gruesome ways. Scurvy is a horrible
> disease. It prevents your body from making collagen, which is the connective
> tissue that holds your body together, so you sort of fall apart from
> within—your teeth fall out, your connections all loosen, and you hemorrhage
> and die. So I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that we do
> need vitamins. And there are a lot of people in the world who don’t have
> access to them—the latest estimate I read was 2 billion people [who are
> vitamin-deficient]. If you give someone vitamin A and they’re suffering from
> nutritional blindness, which is a stage of vitamin A deficiency, they will
> regain their sight, often within days. And that’s crazy. It’s like a miracle
> drug. But it doesn’t translate into the idea that we seem to want to have,
> which is that if you can cure nutritional blindness with vitamin A, then if
> you take 17 times that amount in a pill, you’ll be able to see in the dark.
> The idea that more is better, and more gives you superpowers, is not true."

Saying "vitamins are a waste of money" is arguing against the extreme case
where somebody believes they'll gain super-powers from vitamin loading, but it
doesn't seem to be directed at people who take vitamins to avoid deficiencies.

------
mrfusion
I don't know why this keeps coming up. It's proven that a significant number
of people are deficient in vitamin D, and also Magnesium I believe.

I'm also of the opinion that no one is getting enough potassium (but vitamins
won't help with that).

~~~
MollyR
Yes! Deficiencies could occur from multiple sources as well.

I found out from my doctor I was deficient in vitamin D and calcium probably
due to diet I'm allergic to milk. So I started taking vitamin D and calcium
supplements.

Later I found out from my personal genome study, that my body doesn't process
vitamin B correctly, so I need much larger doses than the average person.

I think once people begin to get personalized genome information, a lot of
misinformation surrounding diet,vitamins, and nutrients will be cleaned up.

~~~
drdoooom
where does one obtain a genome study for themselves?

~~~
MollyR
Honestly I don't know of any official channels to get a study. I was friends
with a Principal Investigator(PI) at a Biology Lab, and he let me run a
personal sample. He also ran his own, and then we talked with some other PI's
about what the results meant.

