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 hor

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.