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Multivitamin does not improve longevity
- lwhi 2y agoI'd imagine use would be most beneficial for people who have diets that don't supply necessary vitamins.
- hackernewds 2y agoIf it were, why wouldn't it promote longevity
- _cenw 2y agoisn't the US full of unhealthy food that is "fortified with vitamins" to distract from the fact that it is unhealthy?
- UberFly 2y agoLike what exactly?
- The_Colonel 2y agoVitamin Water.
- coldtea 2y agoLike all kinds of industrial produced crap that it's better to not consume, with a health-washing badge about how they "contain vitamins" - from corn-flakes and energy drinks to "wonder bread", "Mentos gum with vitamins" and others.
- eru 2y agoFlour is produced industrially (and pre-industrially, in any case, it's heavily processed). Do you include that in your 'industrially produced crap'?
- coldtea 2y agoFlour is not that good for your diet to begin with, regardless of being produced industrially or not. The kind of crap supermarket breads popular in the US, doubly so. But, to answer you question no, I make the common sense distinction, between food stuff produced at industrial scale, and "industrial produced crap", like things that involve preservatives, food additives, sweeteners, artificial coloring, hefty does of corn syrup, lab chemicals, and other such crap, which can range from the plain shitty ("wonder bread") to the spectaturaly shitty (sodas, gum, doritos, skittles, and on and on). In other words, I don't fall for thought-stopping arguments like "Ackchyually, just so you know, water is a chemical too, so what's so bad with industrial food-stuff designed in a food chemistry lab vs grass-fed meat, fish, veggies, and fruits?"
- alt227 2y agoUnfortunately a vast section of the population are are classed poor or in poverty, and so cant afford anything better than wonder bread. This is why fortified foods were introduced in the first place. Its not a conspiracy to make you think that chemically created foods are as good as naturally produced unprocessed foods, its so that people who cant afford or dont have access to healthy natural food dont get deseases like rickets, spinal conditions, or other growth mutations which are common from malnutrition. I feel like your argument has its heart in the right place, but is incredibly uninformed.
- coldtea 2y ago>Unfortunately a vast section of the population are are classed poor or in poverty, and so cant afford anything better than wonder bread. I don't think that's the case. Both because poor people, in countries with lower wages and higher cost of living, still buy regular bread, and also because in the US that shit is also consumed by not-so-poor and middle class families too. >Its not a conspiracy to make you think that chemically created foods are as good as naturally produced unprocessed foods, its so that people who cant afford or dont have access to healthy natural food dont get deseases like rickets, spinal conditions, or other growth mutations which are common from malnutrition. I doubt this as well, since the "with vitamins" badges are also on food that's way beyond necessary spending, from gum to expensive "high end" "healthy" cereal, all the way to power drinks that cost as much as a Starbucks latte. I'm not talking about official state sponsored/mandated programs to add some beneficial substances to food stuff for the general population (which of course is good).
- alt227 2y agoAll flour in the western world is fortified with vitamins, which is mandated by governements. This then filters through the entire food chain so pretty much any thing you eat has fortified ingredients in. There is nothing bad about it, it is there to replace the natural vitamins and minerals removed in the milling process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification#United_King...
- alias_neo 2y ago> All flour in the western world is fortified with vitamins All white/highly milled flour; there is no requirement for wholemeal flour to be fortified as nothing is being lost. I found this out recently from the place I buy my wholemeal bread flour as they had a notice about the requirement, and that it doesn't apply to the wholemeal varieties they sell.
- reedf1 2y agoYou hold the implicit assumption that for something to be efficacious it must correlate with longevity. But it is possible for something to increase your day-to-day experience and quality of life without a meaningful affect on how long you live.
- eru 2y agoA good example might be Crohn's disease: not having Crohn's disease barely affects your life expectancy, but your quality of life is vastly improved.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rightbyte 2y agoPeople that feel their health getting worse might try to compensate with multivitamines? Also, the degenerate case of having a bad vitamine defficiency and also not taking vitamine pills might be too rare to show in the statistics. I mean about a third of the subjects take pills. How many does not take pills and would benefit greatly from it? Only those would move the needle.
- lwhi 2y agoPerhaps the sample group didn't have a deficiency to start with.
- pompino 2y agoYeah, that makes the most sense. Take supplements if and when you need it. I think the real study would be if someone did trended vitamin deficiency data from all the subjects and then co-related the intake (for deficient persons) with health outcomes.
- razakel 2y agoThe British government recommends everyone take vitamin D during winter, and to consider it all year round if you have dark skin. Running the numbers, the difference in cost of taking a multivitamin all year versus taking just vitamin D works out around the price of a pint of beer. So I might as well take the multivitamin. How do I know I'm getting enough molybdenum (whatever that does)?
- Hendrikto 2y ago> So I might as well take the multivitamin It is possible to overdose on vitamins, and you can get adverse effects. It‘s not really a good idea to indiscriminately ”just take everything every day“.
- razakel 2y agoThat's true, but you have to do some really silly things to get to that point. You're not going to overdose on a multivitamin from the supermarket.
- The_Colonel 2y agoDepends on the vitamin. It's difficult to overdose on Vitamin C for example. Vitamin D should be dosed with caution, but taking e. g. 1000 IU a day should be safe even if you get it from other sources.
- ekianjo 2y agooverdosing on Vitamin D is not really a thing
- OJFord 2y agoHypercalcæmia?
- beiburg 2y agoActually, it is possible to overdose on vitamin D, though it’s relatively rare. Vitamin D toxicity, also known as hypervitaminosis D, occurs when there is an excessive amount of vitamin D in the body. This can happen through very high doses of supplements over an extended period or by accidental ingestion of high-dose vitamin D supplements.
- Milvaedd_ 2y agoI don't think people take it to improve longevity. I take it because I have periods of times when I can't eat well enough and I can feel myself getting sluggish. Multivitamin actually help me feeling a little better in those periods (it may be a placebo but I would prefer a test on that specifically instead of longevity)
- eru 2y agoYou can run double-blind studies on yourself, if you are curious. Gwern is famous for running lots of self-blinded experiments on himself. There's various ways to go about this. But basically, you need to find a way to get two different pills that look and taste the same, one containing your active ingredient and one containing a placebo. Eg you quickly crush your vitamin pill (and the placebo) and fill the result in a capsule each. Put each in an empty film canister (or so) and label the bottom. Shuffle both canisters (not looking at the bottom), and pick one at random. Consume the pill, and note down the effects over time. Keep the two canisters. Repeat for as many days as you like. After you've run your experiment, and collected all your data and wrote all your analysis software, you can unblind and actually look what you took each day (and put that in your data collection, too). Instead of varying each day, you can also randomise to vary entire weeks or months; that's especially useful for vitamins that might take a while to show any effect. (You can pick based on how fast they seem to help with your sluggishness.) If you have a friend to help you even a little bit, blinding becomes a lot easier.
- olalonde 2y agoMakes me wonder if there's a risk of losing a placebo effect by knowing it's a placebo effect.
- eru 2y agoNow, designing a controlled experiment to investigate that claim is a good challenge!
- Milvaedd_ 2y agoWe know that placebo can work even if you tell the person that they're taking a placebo. The placebo effect is so famous that people already expect a benefit from it. But I guess it varies by individuals so maybe some people would lose it.
- relyks 2y agoI'm more interested in finding out if multivitamins improve quality of life and reduce instances of disease. You can have both and not have an increase in longevity. For me, I feel as if I need multivitamin I take daily or I don't feel as well mentally or physically.
- chii 2y ago> I feel as if I need multivitamin I take daily or I don't feel as well mentally or physically. which might be enough reason to keep buying and eating it, esp. if the cost isn't that high. Even if it is a placebo effect, it has genuinely improved your health.
- wodenokoto 2y ago> ... improve quality of life and reduce instances of disease. You can have both and not have increase longevity. You can, but wouldn't we expect them to be correlated? E.g., better health and less disease should lead to a longer life (as we assume all non-health related deaths to be random and not correlated to health)
- Milvaedd_ 2y agoI don't think I've seen this suspected correlation receive a lot of credit. A lot of deadly health issues are not correlated to your nutriments intake. Cancer for exemple, thyroid issues, and many others. You would need to take lifestyle into account to even start assessing how multivitamins could potentially increase life expectancy. Take two groups of people who live active lifestyles in non polluted areas, who don't smoke and don't have any other health issues (including mental health issues because a lot of them are correlated with a shortened lifetime). Give placebos for one of these groups. This study would help a bit, but would be impossible : we don't have enough people who live this lifestyle and are available for long testings on multivitamins. They may also change their lifestyle, get into an accident, develop mental health issues, travel...Which would poison the results. I think no one should take multivitamins expecting to live longer. Take them for the other proven benefits - they counteract deficiencies, that's all. My blood tests already show this, I take a blood test before an Iron Supplementation Cure and after, the benefit is clearly visible on the test.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- coldtea 2y ago>In this cohort study of 390 124 generally healthy adults with more than 20 years of follow-up, daily multivitamin use was not associated with a mortality benefit. Aren't most of them the kind of people that are generally middle class and above types, with access to better nutrition and healthcare, and the associated mindset for health improvement, that's a prerequisite to consistently buy and consume multivitamins? That is, the kind of people to not have many vitamin deficiencies to begin with, compared to some working class person who can't afford time to cook, nor had such ideals instilled upon them since childhood, and eats fast food and microwaved stuff 24/7... I'd like to see how e.g. adding multivitamins to industrial foodstuff consumed by poorer families, in the school lunches of poor districts, and so on, improves or doesn't improve health outcomes...
- d4mi3n 2y agoI do believe you’re describing food fortification, which the US performs liberally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification#United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification#United_St... I’d honestly be curious to see if this study accounted for socio-economic class and overall policy around food enrichment or fortification in the regions the participants lived in. I’d expect multivitamins to have a more noticeable impact in places where food wasn’t enriched.
- lwhi 2y agoVitamins are naturally present in good non-processed food. Fortification is only required in processed food.
- d4mi3n 2y agoNot disputing that, but the line gets blurry when you consider things like golden rice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice) as a method of food fortification. The purpose for golden rice touches on a big consideration for nutritional policy: diets aren't always diverse and don't always include enough sources of nutrition. History is rife with stuff like beriberi or scurvy due to cultural norms or inability to find varied sources of nutrition.
- lmpdev 2y agoI thought it was well known that we cannot determine how well it absorbs into the body in isolation like this? Also a lot of seemingly textbook examples of the placebo effect in this thread I take multivitamins but acknowledge they may be doing nothing more than placebo
- bhaney 2y agoDevastating news for all 10 of the people who were taking multivitamins in the hope that it would prevent them from dying of cancer or heart disease.
- ricardobayes 2y agohttps://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/vitamin-d-fact-sheet#:~:text=Higher%20vitamin%20D%20levels%20have,cancers%20(14%E2%80%9317) https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d....
- Beretta_Vexee 2y agoVitamin D is absent from many multi-vitamins because it is fat-soluble rather than water-soluble, more expensive and the recommended doses are open to debate. What's more, it's one of the few vitamins with significant negative effects if overdosed. People don't know how to dose milligrams and give absurd quantities to newborn babies with terrible consequences. Oral absorption is not very good. It is generally more effective to spend an afternoon outdoors.
- 121212hello 2y agobtw it improves health , i don't take it for longevity just for good health with less disease
- eru 2y agoAlas, there's no evidence it does so.
- jajko 2y agoThis study wasn't about it. Do you have one claiming that?
- eru 2y agoThere's basically no evidence anywhere that vitamin supplementation does anything at all for generally healthy people who don't currently suffer a specific deficiency. If you do find some studies that find some evidence for vitamin supplements doing anything (for generally healthy people), please let me know! See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJsCaQTXiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJsCaQTXiE for a quick intro. (Sorry, don't have enough time to find exactly the right video and/or paper.)
- Milvaedd_ 2y agoThe person you're answering to didn't say anything about "healthy people who don't currently suffer a specific deficiency". I don't think multivitamins are meant for this population anyway, it's for people who know they're prone to deficiencies or even know they have one specific issue (e.g women and iron, dark skin and vitamin D)
- eru 2y agoI've anecdotally heard of iron supplementation working for some women. However, if I remember right, even for the seemingly clear case of dark skinned people vitamin D supplementation basically has no evidence. But I'd be happy to see any randomised controlled study (or similar) that says otherwise! There's plenty of observational studies that people with lower than average vitamin D also have various other health problems. But I don't know of any study that shows that vitamin D deficiency helps eg dark skinned people (or any group at all).
- mg 2y agoFrom the conclusion section: MV use was not associated with lower all-cause mortality risk in the first (multivariable-adjusted HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02-1.07) or second (multivariable- adjusted HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 0.99-1.08) halves of follow-up. Do I read this correctly, that the hazard rate in the multivitamin group was 4% higher than in the non-multivitamin group? And do I read the CI of 1.02-1.07 correctly in that this difference is statistically significant?
- ilius2 2y agoAgain, correlation or causation?!
- mihaaly 2y agoYet another statistical analysis of self reported questionnaire about if death can be avoided by something. How about other measures of one's life before the inevitable? Life quality that is there not only for those with diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular problems having less or more known mechanism that (as far as I am aware) not strongly correlates (yet has casual effect) to the consumption of vitamins. I am the only one tired of these statistical analyses with insignificant deviation smearing billions of aspects together through general public created guided data drawing grandiose conclusions only in titles, while the scope of the title is also very limited despite playing the tune of primal fear to inflate its self importance beyond the content?
- jonex 2y agoThey didn't specify what they qualified as a multivitamin, my guess is that the definition is rather loose due to the scale of the study. There's a lot of different mixes of multivitamins in the store. You would buy the one that fit's the efficiency pattern you want to prevent. If your goal is to specifically reduce mortality rather than prevent short term fatigue, you would need to pick the right one. From what I can tell, they haven't ensure that the long term consumption pattern was consistent either, so they may be mixing people who took multivitamins for a year around the initial study with those who took it every day for their whole life. That would reduce the effect size significantly. The general advice on vitamin supplements is usually to take the ones you have explicit reasons for taking and to focus more on food in general. This study, while possible useful as a way to debunk highly unrealistic claims of multivitamin effectiveness, doesn't really change the picture here.
- Glauco 2y agoHello everyone, I believe that the studies done so far have considered all possible variables such as different ethnicities, lifestyles in general as well as the health conditions of the various subjects. However, they have forgotten the most important variable, which is the quality of the ingredients in multi-vitamins. We cannot assume that a hatchback can perform as well as a Porsche, even if they are both cars. All supplements still have no real discipline and, as yet, there are no testing requirements for manufacturers. Raw materials are of vegetable origin and are imported from third countries without any quality guarantee. Supplements often contain bacterial contaminants such as aflatoxins, heavy metals, active ingredient titres that do not correspond to those declared, and dosage variations from batch to batch can have an effect on human health. Glauco
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: The Limited Value of Multivitamin Supplements https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40828179