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The article treats the belief in supplements entirely as a case of well-nourished people pursuing quack fixes, ignoring scientifically credible practices such a
by dkarl 13y ago
The article treats the belief in supplements entirely as a case of well-nourished people pursuing quack fixes, ignoring scientifically credible practices such as food fortification using iodine and folic acid, the widely-known connection between vitamin C and scurvy, the use of iron supplements to treat anemia, and the historical experience with real malnutrition. The article makes it sound like a ludicrous idea that snuck into the public consciousness via the senility of Linus Pauling in the late 1960s, but vitamin supplementation makes much more sense as an attempt to continue applying a historically successful formula of improving human health by identifying previously unrecognized dietary deficiencies and correcting them.
Also, the ending of the article destroys its credibility. The author is no less an intellectual hack than the people he writes about.
- mikevm 13y agoYes, but people mistake a threshold response for a dose-dependent response. Maybe certain vitamins (and pseudo-vitamins like vitamin D3) have a threshold response, that is, you only need a certain amount of it in your body for it to function properly, and adding any more will not make you any healthier (overdosing on vitamins can be fatal, so you can't just up the dosage).
- gwern 13y agoAnd also timing effects. To take the previously-mentioned iodine effect - while administering iodine in childhood or later will eliminate goiters due to iodine deficiency, as far as anyone can tell, post-natal iodine does little to nothing about the retardation or intelligence decreases caused by iodine deficiency, and even in pregnancy, the effect of supplementation seems to start decreasing from conception.
- codersteve 13y agoThere are cases where science has proven that supplementation has value--adding Vitamin D to milk, for example. In specific cases of deficiency it has been proven to work. That doesn't mean more is better. There is no evidence to indicate that the general population taking multi-vitamins helps anything.