7 ms·

Multivitamins' 'benefits' are all in your head: study

43 points by lelf 6y ago

flubert 6y ago
>The real concern is that people are wasting money on multivitamins that would better benefit their health if spent elsewhere, Paranjpe said. Curious if there would be a concrete suggestion to replace the $5/month on vitamins. Full disclosure: I started taking a multivitamin recently, on the basis of it seems like it can't hurt, and who knows, maybe it could help for corona.
- boyter 6y ago
  There has been a lot of posts on the front page recently about vitamin D deficiency and covid. Surely most multi-vitamins have D in them?
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Typical is 400 units. My prescription is for 50,000 (weekly) These days I take about 3,000 in morning, as evening will keep me awake.
- FriedPickles 6y ago
  > Curious if there would be a concrete suggestion to replace the $5/month on vitamins. Maybe fish oil and/or another Omega-3 source like flax seed.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    I had a doctor who was obsessed with balancing Omega-3 and Omega-6. He kept claiming that excess Omega-3 did nothing without 6's. I kinda scratched my head at that, because it was so new, but I never followed up after I moved to a different state and found a new doctor who was equally unfamiliar with that claim.
    - treeman79 6y ago
      I have seen that before. Rabbit hole is deep on that stuff. Improving Vitamin Absorption is another step. Some with oil, some water, etc.
  - fiblye 6y ago
    Is fish oil anything more than snake oil? I've never seen concrete evidence that it does anything. Wikipedia also seems to say it's all ambiguous, with studies flip flopping as much as coffee and wine health studies.
    - treeman79 6y ago
      Have chronic illness. Fish oil and the other ones parent mentioned are all part of my daily routine. I went from 7/10 pain level to 2/10. Those all get mentioned a lot in various help support groups.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Snake Oil Supplements [1] has studies to show that fish oil and omega 3 is: - effective for preterm birth - promising for colorectal cancer - inconclusive for cardiovascular disease, low sperm count, depression, psychosis, cystic fibrosis - slightly beneficial for cancer symptoms - has no effect on diabetes, Crohn's disease, asthma, alzheimers - harmful: increases the risk of prostate cancer Regarding coffee, there is strong evidence that consumption of black coffee reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease -- a massive meta-analysis of 36 studies covering 1.28 million people and 36500 cases of cardiovascular disease showed a nonlinear association with minimal CVD risk at 3-5 cups per day [2]. [1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-... [2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha.113.005925 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsder 6y ago
  > on the basis of it seems like it can't hurt And that's the misconception. Things like Vitamin C are no problem. Your body takes what it needs, stores a bunch, and easily excretes the excess. Things like Vitamin D, however, aren't so benign. Excessive Vitamin D has knock on effects with Calcium. Also, Vitamin D tends to accumulate in fat, so if you store up too much, it can take weeks to bring down. Just because something is a "Vitamin" doesn't make it harmless. And, this is before we even start considering things like supplements which have who knows what in them.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Potassium is my trouble maker. Fixes burning hands and feet caused by another med. but is not one to mess around with. Would be nice To be able to quickly check blood levels
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Darmody 6y ago
  Maybe or maybe not. Taking multivitamins with iron as a man can be harmful so be careful. I think a better idea than taking an all-in-one is taking only what your body needs. If have a stable diet and you know what you're really putting in your mouth, it shouldn't be difficult to know what supplements are good for you. I take vitamins B, C, D and K and magnesium and zinc. I have never left better than now. I don't need coffee anymore to have energy throughout the day, I just feel good.
nwah1 6y ago
This is such a vague headline that it contains no useful information, given that clearly individual vitamins have benefits, and multivitamins can be a mix of any number of any quantity of vitamins. That many people have no idea what they are purchasing is a separate matter.
- nabla9 6y ago
  You are supposed to read the article!!!
  - nwah1 6y ago
    When a headline indicates a flagrantly ignorant viewpoint, why would anyone be obligated to read further?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >This is such a vague headline that it contains no useful information As if the headline alone should give the full breakdown/
  - nwah1 6y ago
    If the headline misrepresents the study, then that is the fault of this publication, and nobody should share the article or read it. If the headline is an accurate representation of the study, then the study is garbage without having to know anything else about it.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >If the headline is an accurate representation of the study, then the study is garbage without having to know anything else about it. So much for confirmation bias...
      - nwah1 6y ago
        "Why Albert Einstein's theories prove the Earth is flat." Hmmm... this seems fishy. I'm not going to read any further. Peanut gallery: That seems a bit presumptuous. Confirmation bias much?
LatteLazy 6y ago
"Not even wrong"
stevespang 6y ago
How about we leave this argument to REAL SCIENCE, how about to the most quoted and cited biochemist on planet Earth ? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30322941/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30322941/ https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/10/412016/adequate-consumption-longevity-vitamins-could-prolong-healthy-aging-nutrition https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/10/412016/adequate-consumptio...
doublekill 6y ago
Terrible study if that is the conclusion. Yes, multivitamins don't help with cancer or heart attacks. Yes, it is better to eat a healthy diet. But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient. Your energy levels and immune system improves. And "all in your head" is nothing to scoff at when the Placebo effect has been measured to help shorten disease by 7%.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient. Sure. But the vast majority of people are not deficient. 86% of Americans take vitamins or supplements of some sort. 21% have been diagnosed with kind of vitamin deficiency. And the vast majority of those could, to your point, eat more lettuce. [1] "Most people have no need to take vitamins and are wasting their money on supplements that are unlikely to improve their health and may actually harm it." [1] If you aren't deficient, you may end up with an excess of fat soluble vitamins (A, D) which may actually poison you. [1] https://osteopathic.org/2019/01/16/poll-finds-86-of-americans-take-vitamins-or-supplements-yet-only-21-have-a-confirmed-nutritional-deficiency/ https://osteopathic.org/2019/01/16/poll-finds-86-of-american...
  - doublekill 6y ago
    Deficiencies disparately impact minorities and poor people. And when I was a student even I could not afford that Bell pepper. 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are real people. If you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose? Talking about excess I hear the medical professional disdain for vitamins in that. Understandably, because they get those people who take extreme doses of over the counter stuff in their visiting hours. But that's no risk to use as an argument against vitamin supplementation for regular use. Multivitamins would be banned if regular use caused overdose.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Totally, and those people may need multivitamins, but that's my point. Further, "if you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose?" -- vitamin and mineral supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and vary widely by brand and batch and so on. FDA recommends 700IU for an average adult. The first bottle of multivitamin I found, "Sundown Multivitamin Gummies" has 800IU, which is additive with your diet. 4000IU is the upper limit (and 60,000IU per day has been shown to cause toxicity) I've seen people chow down on those gummies because they're tasty. Not likely to hit, though. The first Vitamin D supplement (Forest Leaf D3) I found is a once-weekly 50,000IU hum-dinger that provides on average double the safe upper limit. Lastly, if folks at the poverty line are taking these sometimes expensive, often unnecessary supplements, could that money be better spent on other things?
jonplackett 6y ago
Correlation does not equal cause. People who take multivitamins probably have different feelings about health than people who don't. That doesn't mean the multivitamin caused that.
bamboozled 6y ago
It's pretty baseless article and it only raises a new question for me, why don't they work? This argument and the other regarding protein powders not being "real food" stands beyond reason to me. If you're eating vitamins or protein in food or in a pill, what would the difference be? Are smoothies, soups or other processed foods not food? I take a multivitamin and magnesium supplement, although I take them at the same time as my breakfast (as stated on the label). Logically this makes sense to me, as the contents will be absorbed and digested along with other food stuffs rather than just flushed through the body. The only way I could imagine multi-vitamins useless and ineffective is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  > The only way I could imagine they're useless is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible? Yes. It is what they are bound to and how they are prepared. The idea of "micronutrients" popped up during the mass production of food post-war--(think of all those cereals that were fortified, fortified because all the nutrients had been stripped out during manufacture!)--and went out of vogue in the 70's. This was the idea that you could reduce food (like a steak) to just a bunch of chemicals, eat those chemicals, and have the same outcome as eating a steak. We've learned a lot more. (That's a crass way to describe it, but close enough.) I am treating bone loss and I take a prescription Vitamin D because the kind found in OTC single- or multivitamins are not biologically available due to their (inexpensive) preparations.
  - Aardwolf 6y ago
    What's the reason why a well prepared one is prescription based and a useless one OTC?
    - treeman79 6y ago
      1,000u daily pill vs 50,0000u Weekly Unlikely, but you can Overdose on it. I have a prescription for it. Still prefer daily pill.
    - 6y ago
kazinator 6y ago
> However, a comprehensive medical history—assessing dozens of physical and mental illnesses—revealed zero actual health differences between people who did or did not take multivitamins. This is probably the point where the asinine line of reasoning in this article derails and hits bottom. Vitamins and minerals are not for "health", but for body function. Deficiency in a vitamin or mineral is not necessarily going to show up as a documented physical or mental illness in your someone's medical history. If vitamin supplements don't do anything (the benefit is all in the mind), then it must mean that if we take a group of people who are under conditions that will cause them to develop scurvy, and we give half of them a vitamin C supplement, keeping the other half as a control group, then that supplemented group will develop scurvy, indistinguishably from the control group. Supplementing with vitamins or minerals in which one is not deficient is a waste of money, and could cause a harmful excess, depending on the specific substance. But "everyone" knows that. And, yes, people use supplements without obtaining evidence that they are deficient.
- gvx 6y ago
  I think you misinterpreted what the research was about, because you pretty much summed up their conclusion in your final paragraph --- except that people who use supplements generally don't know that (in no small part thanks to the efforts of the companies represented by the Dr. Wong quoted in the news article).
- aviraldg 6y ago
  There are least two supplements for which it's probably unnecessary to test for deficiency to know that supplementation may be helpful under certain conditions: * Vitamin D (for certain races, and for people with a mostly sedentary lifestyle in countries where exposure to sunlight is low) * B12 (vegans) Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Magnesium tends to be high up. Amazing stuff.
neetrain 6y ago
If the survey results is true: what's the point of "required intake per day" of nutrition? Whether you reach the requirements or not doesn't affect your health, then it's not "required".
- colechristensen 6y ago
  The recomended daily values have varying levels of scientific support. There are many diseases related to micronutrient deficiencies, that isn’t being questioned. The problem at hand is at what levels measurable outcomes disappear.
saas_sam 6y ago
There was a much better (based on more rigorous studies) anti-vitamin piece back in 2014 that made the internet rounds and I think Dr. Rhonda Patrick had a great rebuttal of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u8UdZeOhc&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u8UdZeOhc&feature=emb_titl...
- coldtea 6y ago
  I don't think a video by a vlogger (even if it's a doctor with a Ph.D) is a proper "rebuttal" of a paper, much less a great one.
  - saas_sam 6y ago
    I don't think a source-less opinion from an anonymous internet commenter (even if it's on Hacker News) is a proper rebuttal of a rebuttal, great or otherwise. Sources are what count. She shares many.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >I don't think a source-less opinion from an anonymous internet commenter (even if it's on Hacker News) is a proper rebuttal of a rebuttal You need a source attached to agree with an argument that a vlog is not a rebuttal of a paper? >Sources are what count. She shares many. Sources are a dime a dozen. Bad/happy/fradulent papers also have tons of sources, and even peer reviewers don't ever bother to check them...
danielsokil 6y ago
For the past few years I've consumed vision health vitamins on a daily basis, and can't say that there was any noticeable improvement in my vision. On the contrary I did notice that they reduce eye pain. Some weeks I could not afford the vitamins and after hours of exposure to the computer screen, an intense pain would hit the eyes making it very difficult to continue looking at the screen. When I can afford the vitamins, I continue to consume them, with the expectation that they will continue to reduce the pain.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Magnesium. Get fl-41 lenses. Axon or thermaspec. If you ever have double vision then Next eye appointment ask to have alignment checked. Source. Was functionally blind much of the day for a couple years.
- Darmody 6y ago
  I'm curious, what are those "vision health vitamins"?
  - danielsokil 6y ago
    https://www.amway.com/p/104144 https://www.amway.com/p/104144
- gilrain 6y ago
  Why are you confident that this is not a placebo effect?
  - danielsokil 6y ago
    I'm not sure of another method to achieve similar results considering that this could be a placebo effect.
    - danielsokil 6y ago
      From what I understand, the basis of placebo is brain convincing the body. How else could this be achieved besides consuming the vitamins? It seems to me that we haven't gotten that far yet.
maerF0x0 6y ago
>However, a comprehensive medical history—assessing dozens of physical and mental illnesses—revealed zero actual health differences between people who did or did not take multivitamins. I can't trust a society (or medical/scientific community) that can only express health as the lack of critical illness to make me optimally "healthy" (operation and expression). To illustrate the point for many diseases/issues they are progressions and spectrum -- like Osteoporosis -- such that sure maybe the humble multivitamin (and minerals?) didn't cure it for life, but maybe it made it more manageable in the final 10-15 yrs?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Thing is, you're looking at this backwards, from a position of "doing something must be better than doing nothing." Frequently, it's not. The onus here should be on the multivitamin to prove that it is effective, not for study authors to prove that it does nothing. If you actually dig around you won't find studies that show multivitamins are effective at anything for your average westerner -- or anyone who isn't clinically malnourished for that matter. That's not to say that - in certain cases, when you're lacking a specific vitamin - it won't help manage a specific condition, but scattershot "essence of food" has very little data to support it's efficacy. More vitamin doesn't mean better health. Water soluble vitamins saturate in your body, and the excess is excreted in urine. Fat soluble vitamins, however, build up, and taking more than you need may lead to various kinds of poisoning (particularly A, D, B3 and B6 [3]). Generally speaking if you're not eating 100% of your meals at McDonalds, you're getting all the vitamins you need from your diet and more vitamins is at best neutral and at absolute worst fatal. Here's a study from 2011 that shows no decrease in all cause mortality, no decrease in cancer risk [1]. Here's one that shows all cause mortality was 5% higher in multivitamin takers [2]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105257/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/152/2/149/87699 https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/152/2/149/87699 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis
  - doublekill 6y ago
    So what about: > The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 10% of all Americans have a nutritional deficiency. And what about very low, but non-deficient levels? It very much depends how the study is designed: in this case they do not measure quality of life or disease progression, but clinical outcome. That is what OP was alluding to: if you are going to only look at clinical outcome and completely tar "effectiveness" with that, then that is a very one-sided view of health and well-being. Osteoporose patients are at increased risk of vitamin K deficiency. Just because multivitamins are not effective at taking us to Mars, are you really going to recommend patients to spend their vitamin money on fresh fruits?
VLM 6y ago
Its interesting that this study is bottom up not finding anything. So 5000 generic vitamin users and one of the ten chronic conditions researched was asthma. Working the opposite direction, https://www.cureus.com/articles/7343-a-review-on-the-role-of-vitamin-d-in-asthma https://www.cureus.com/articles/7343-a-review-on-the-role-of... is a survey paper covering 14 recent observational studies of the effect of Vit D on Asthma and 12 of the studies showed actual improved results for folks with asthma. Its not a numbers game; google and the AAFA imply about 7 percent of adults have asthma related condition, and 7% of 5K would be about 350 people in the study likely had asthma. The survey paper had studies with up to, for example "616 children diagnosed with asthma in Costa Rica" so the numbers are similar. I just find it interesting that if you ask random untrained people how, for example, vit D affects their asthma you get no result, but if a professional scientific study is run there is a statistically significant difference in outcome.
teilo 6y ago
Well, sure. But most multi-vitamins are crap anyway. They just don't contain enough active ingredients to make any difference, particularly minerals. The forms they contain are usually whatever is cheap, and is poorly absorbed. How do you effectively mix fat soluble and water soluble vitamins in the same pill? Therapeutic doses are much higher than anything you are going to get in a multi

43 points by lelf 6y ago

>The real concern is that people are wasting money on multivitamins that would better benefit their health if spent elsewhere, Paranjpe said. Curious if there would be a concrete suggestion to replace the $5/month on vitamins. Full disclosure: I started taking a multivitamin recently, on the basis of it seems like it can't hurt, and who knows, maybe it could help for corona.

boyter 6y ago
There has been a lot of posts on the front page recently about vitamin D deficiency and covid. Surely most multi-vitamins have D in them?
- treeman79 6y ago
  Typical is 400 units. My prescription is for 50,000 (weekly) These days I take about 3,000 in morning, as evening will keep me awake.
FriedPickles 6y ago
> Curious if there would be a concrete suggestion to replace the $5/month on vitamins. Maybe fish oil and/or another Omega-3 source like flax seed.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  I had a doctor who was obsessed with balancing Omega-3 and Omega-6. He kept claiming that excess Omega-3 did nothing without 6's. I kinda scratched my head at that, because it was so new, but I never followed up after I moved to a different state and found a new doctor who was equally unfamiliar with that claim.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    I have seen that before. Rabbit hole is deep on that stuff. Improving Vitamin Absorption is another step. Some with oil, some water, etc.
- fiblye 6y ago
  Is fish oil anything more than snake oil? I've never seen concrete evidence that it does anything. Wikipedia also seems to say it's all ambiguous, with studies flip flopping as much as coffee and wine health studies.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Have chronic illness. Fish oil and the other ones parent mentioned are all part of my daily routine. I went from 7/10 pain level to 2/10. Those all get mentioned a lot in various help support groups.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Snake Oil Supplements [1] has studies to show that fish oil and omega 3 is: - effective for preterm birth - promising for colorectal cancer - inconclusive for cardiovascular disease, low sperm count, depression, psychosis, cystic fibrosis - slightly beneficial for cancer symptoms - has no effect on diabetes, Crohn's disease, asthma, alzheimers - harmful: increases the risk of prostate cancer Regarding coffee, there is strong evidence that consumption of black coffee reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease -- a massive meta-analysis of 36 studies covering 1.28 million people and 36500 cases of cardiovascular disease showed a nonlinear association with minimal CVD risk at 3-5 cups per day [2]. [1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-... [2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha.113.005925 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bsder 6y ago
> on the basis of it seems like it can't hurt And that's the misconception. Things like Vitamin C are no problem. Your body takes what it needs, stores a bunch, and easily excretes the excess. Things like Vitamin D, however, aren't so benign. Excessive Vitamin D has knock on effects with Calcium. Also, Vitamin D tends to accumulate in fat, so if you store up too much, it can take weeks to bring down. Just because something is a "Vitamin" doesn't make it harmless. And, this is before we even start considering things like supplements which have who knows what in them.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Potassium is my trouble maker. Fixes burning hands and feet caused by another med. but is not one to mess around with. Would be nice To be able to quickly check blood levels
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Darmody 6y ago
Maybe or maybe not. Taking multivitamins with iron as a man can be harmful so be careful. I think a better idea than taking an all-in-one is taking only what your body needs. If have a stable diet and you know what you're really putting in your mouth, it shouldn't be difficult to know what supplements are good for you. I take vitamins B, C, D and K and magnesium and zinc. I have never left better than now. I don't need coffee anymore to have energy throughout the day, I just feel good.

nwah1 6y ago

This is such a vague headline that it contains no useful information, given that clearly individual vitamins have benefits, and multivitamins can be a mix of any number of any quantity of vitamins. That many people have no idea what they are purchasing is a separate matter.

nabla9 6y ago
You are supposed to read the article!!!
- nwah1 6y ago
  When a headline indicates a flagrantly ignorant viewpoint, why would anyone be obligated to read further?
coldtea 6y ago
>This is such a vague headline that it contains no useful information As if the headline alone should give the full breakdown/
- nwah1 6y ago
  If the headline misrepresents the study, then that is the fault of this publication, and nobody should share the article or read it. If the headline is an accurate representation of the study, then the study is garbage without having to know anything else about it.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >If the headline is an accurate representation of the study, then the study is garbage without having to know anything else about it. So much for confirmation bias...
    - nwah1 6y ago
      "Why Albert Einstein's theories prove the Earth is flat." Hmmm... this seems fishy. I'm not going to read any further. Peanut gallery: That seems a bit presumptuous. Confirmation bias much?

LatteLazy 6y ago

"Not even wrong"

stevespang 6y ago

How about we leave this argument to REAL SCIENCE, how about to the most quoted and cited biochemist on planet Earth ? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30322941/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30322941/ https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/10/412016/adequate-consumption-longevity-vitamins-could-prolong-healthy-aging-nutrition https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/10/412016/adequate-consumptio...

doublekill 6y ago

Terrible study if that is the conclusion. Yes, multivitamins don't help with cancer or heart attacks. Yes, it is better to eat a healthy diet. But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient. Your energy levels and immune system improves. And "all in your head" is nothing to scoff at when the Placebo effect has been measured to help shorten disease by 7%.

arcticbull 6y ago
> But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient. Sure. But the vast majority of people are not deficient. 86% of Americans take vitamins or supplements of some sort. 21% have been diagnosed with kind of vitamin deficiency. And the vast majority of those could, to your point, eat more lettuce. [1] "Most people have no need to take vitamins and are wasting their money on supplements that are unlikely to improve their health and may actually harm it." [1] If you aren't deficient, you may end up with an excess of fat soluble vitamins (A, D) which may actually poison you. [1] https://osteopathic.org/2019/01/16/poll-finds-86-of-americans-take-vitamins-or-supplements-yet-only-21-have-a-confirmed-nutritional-deficiency/ https://osteopathic.org/2019/01/16/poll-finds-86-of-american...
- doublekill 6y ago
  Deficiencies disparately impact minorities and poor people. And when I was a student even I could not afford that Bell pepper. 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are real people. If you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose? Talking about excess I hear the medical professional disdain for vitamins in that. Understandably, because they get those people who take extreme doses of over the counter stuff in their visiting hours. But that's no risk to use as an argument against vitamin supplementation for regular use. Multivitamins would be banned if regular use caused overdose.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Totally, and those people may need multivitamins, but that's my point. Further, "if you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose?" -- vitamin and mineral supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and vary widely by brand and batch and so on. FDA recommends 700IU for an average adult. The first bottle of multivitamin I found, "Sundown Multivitamin Gummies" has 800IU, which is additive with your diet. 4000IU is the upper limit (and 60,000IU per day has been shown to cause toxicity) I've seen people chow down on those gummies because they're tasty. Not likely to hit, though. The first Vitamin D supplement (Forest Leaf D3) I found is a once-weekly 50,000IU hum-dinger that provides on average double the safe upper limit. Lastly, if folks at the poverty line are taking these sometimes expensive, often unnecessary supplements, could that money be better spent on other things?

jonplackett 6y ago

Correlation does not equal cause. People who take multivitamins probably have different feelings about health than people who don't. That doesn't mean the multivitamin caused that.

bamboozled 6y ago

It's pretty baseless article and it only raises a new question for me, why don't they work? This argument and the other regarding protein powders not being "real food" stands beyond reason to me. If you're eating vitamins or protein in food or in a pill, what would the difference be? Are smoothies, soups or other processed foods not food? I take a multivitamin and magnesium supplement, although I take them at the same time as my breakfast (as stated on the label). Logically this makes sense to me, as the contents will be absorbed and digested along with other food stuffs rather than just flushed through the body. The only way I could imagine multi-vitamins useless and ineffective is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible?

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
> The only way I could imagine they're useless is if the the vitamins themselves are structurally different and indigestible? Yes. It is what they are bound to and how they are prepared. The idea of "micronutrients" popped up during the mass production of food post-war--(think of all those cereals that were fortified, fortified because all the nutrients had been stripped out during manufacture!)--and went out of vogue in the 70's. This was the idea that you could reduce food (like a steak) to just a bunch of chemicals, eat those chemicals, and have the same outcome as eating a steak. We've learned a lot more. (That's a crass way to describe it, but close enough.) I am treating bone loss and I take a prescription Vitamin D because the kind found in OTC single- or multivitamins are not biologically available due to their (inexpensive) preparations.
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  What's the reason why a well prepared one is prescription based and a useless one OTC?
  - treeman79 6y ago
    1,000u daily pill vs 50,0000u Weekly Unlikely, but you can Overdose on it. I have a prescription for it. Still prefer daily pill.
  - 6y ago

kazinator 6y ago

> However, a comprehensive medical history—assessing dozens of physical and mental illnesses—revealed zero actual health differences between people who did or did not take multivitamins. This is probably the point where the asinine line of reasoning in this article derails and hits bottom. Vitamins and minerals are not for "health", but for body function. Deficiency in a vitamin or mineral is not necessarily going to show up as a documented physical or mental illness in your someone's medical history. If vitamin supplements don't do anything (the benefit is all in the mind), then it must mean that if we take a group of people who are under conditions that will cause them to develop scurvy, and we give half of them a vitamin C supplement, keeping the other half as a control group, then that supplemented group will develop scurvy, indistinguishably from the control group. Supplementing with vitamins or minerals in which one is not deficient is a waste of money, and could cause a harmful excess, depending on the specific substance. But "everyone" knows that. And, yes, people use supplements without obtaining evidence that they are deficient.

gvx 6y ago
I think you misinterpreted what the research was about, because you pretty much summed up their conclusion in your final paragraph --- except that people who use supplements generally don't know that (in no small part thanks to the efforts of the companies represented by the Dr. Wong quoted in the news article).
aviraldg 6y ago
There are least two supplements for which it's probably unnecessary to test for deficiency to know that supplementation may be helpful under certain conditions: * Vitamin D (for certain races, and for people with a mostly sedentary lifestyle in countries where exposure to sunlight is low) * B12 (vegans) Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Magnesium tends to be high up. Amazing stuff.

neetrain 6y ago

If the survey results is true: what's the point of "required intake per day" of nutrition? Whether you reach the requirements or not doesn't affect your health, then it's not "required".

colechristensen 6y ago
The recomended daily values have varying levels of scientific support. There are many diseases related to micronutrient deficiencies, that isn’t being questioned. The problem at hand is at what levels measurable outcomes disappear.

saas_sam 6y ago

There was a much better (based on more rigorous studies) anti-vitamin piece back in 2014 that made the internet rounds and I think Dr. Rhonda Patrick had a great rebuttal of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u8UdZeOhc&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u8UdZeOhc&feature=emb_titl...

coldtea 6y ago
I don't think a video by a vlogger (even if it's a doctor with a Ph.D) is a proper "rebuttal" of a paper, much less a great one.
- saas_sam 6y ago
  I don't think a source-less opinion from an anonymous internet commenter (even if it's on Hacker News) is a proper rebuttal of a rebuttal, great or otherwise. Sources are what count. She shares many.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >I don't think a source-less opinion from an anonymous internet commenter (even if it's on Hacker News) is a proper rebuttal of a rebuttal You need a source attached to agree with an argument that a vlog is not a rebuttal of a paper? >Sources are what count. She shares many. Sources are a dime a dozen. Bad/happy/fradulent papers also have tons of sources, and even peer reviewers don't ever bother to check them...

danielsokil 6y ago

For the past few years I've consumed vision health vitamins on a daily basis, and can't say that there was any noticeable improvement in my vision. On the contrary I did notice that they reduce eye pain. Some weeks I could not afford the vitamins and after hours of exposure to the computer screen, an intense pain would hit the eyes making it very difficult to continue looking at the screen. When I can afford the vitamins, I continue to consume them, with the expectation that they will continue to reduce the pain.

treeman79 6y ago
Magnesium. Get fl-41 lenses. Axon or thermaspec. If you ever have double vision then Next eye appointment ask to have alignment checked. Source. Was functionally blind much of the day for a couple years.
Darmody 6y ago
I'm curious, what are those "vision health vitamins"?
- danielsokil 6y ago
  https://www.amway.com/p/104144 https://www.amway.com/p/104144
gilrain 6y ago
Why are you confident that this is not a placebo effect?
- danielsokil 6y ago
  I'm not sure of another method to achieve similar results considering that this could be a placebo effect.
  - danielsokil 6y ago
    From what I understand, the basis of placebo is brain convincing the body. How else could this be achieved besides consuming the vitamins? It seems to me that we haven't gotten that far yet.

maerF0x0 6y ago

>However, a comprehensive medical history—assessing dozens of physical and mental illnesses—revealed zero actual health differences between people who did or did not take multivitamins. I can't trust a society (or medical/scientific community) that can only express health as the lack of critical illness to make me optimally "healthy" (operation and expression). To illustrate the point for many diseases/issues they are progressions and spectrum -- like Osteoporosis -- such that sure maybe the humble multivitamin (and minerals?) didn't cure it for life, but maybe it made it more manageable in the final 10-15 yrs?

arcticbull 6y ago
Thing is, you're looking at this backwards, from a position of "doing something must be better than doing nothing." Frequently, it's not. The onus here should be on the multivitamin to prove that it is effective, not for study authors to prove that it does nothing. If you actually dig around you won't find studies that show multivitamins are effective at anything for your average westerner -- or anyone who isn't clinically malnourished for that matter. That's not to say that - in certain cases, when you're lacking a specific vitamin - it won't help manage a specific condition, but scattershot "essence of food" has very little data to support it's efficacy. More vitamin doesn't mean better health. Water soluble vitamins saturate in your body, and the excess is excreted in urine. Fat soluble vitamins, however, build up, and taking more than you need may lead to various kinds of poisoning (particularly A, D, B3 and B6 [3]). Generally speaking if you're not eating 100% of your meals at McDonalds, you're getting all the vitamins you need from your diet and more vitamins is at best neutral and at absolute worst fatal. Here's a study from 2011 that shows no decrease in all cause mortality, no decrease in cancer risk [1]. Here's one that shows all cause mortality was 5% higher in multivitamin takers [2]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105257/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/152/2/149/87699 https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/152/2/149/87699 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis
- doublekill 6y ago
  So what about: > The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 10% of all Americans have a nutritional deficiency. And what about very low, but non-deficient levels? It very much depends how the study is designed: in this case they do not measure quality of life or disease progression, but clinical outcome. That is what OP was alluding to: if you are going to only look at clinical outcome and completely tar "effectiveness" with that, then that is a very one-sided view of health and well-being. Osteoporose patients are at increased risk of vitamin K deficiency. Just because multivitamins are not effective at taking us to Mars, are you really going to recommend patients to spend their vitamin money on fresh fruits?

VLM 6y ago

Its interesting that this study is bottom up not finding anything. So 5000 generic vitamin users and one of the ten chronic conditions researched was asthma. Working the opposite direction, https://www.cureus.com/articles/7343-a-review-on-the-role-of-vitamin-d-in-asthma https://www.cureus.com/articles/7343-a-review-on-the-role-of... is a survey paper covering 14 recent observational studies of the effect of Vit D on Asthma and 12 of the studies showed actual improved results for folks with asthma. Its not a numbers game; google and the AAFA imply about 7 percent of adults have asthma related condition, and 7% of 5K would be about 350 people in the study likely had asthma. The survey paper had studies with up to, for example "616 children diagnosed with asthma in Costa Rica" so the numbers are similar. I just find it interesting that if you ask random untrained people how, for example, vit D affects their asthma you get no result, but if a professional scientific study is run there is a statistically significant difference in outcome.

teilo 6y ago

Well, sure. But most multi-vitamins are crap anyway. They just don't contain enough active ingredients to make any difference, particularly minerals. The forms they contain are usually whatever is cheap, and is poorly absorbed. How do you effectively mix fat soluble and water soluble vitamins in the same pill? Therapeutic doses are much higher than anything you are going to get in a multi