[patrickg_zill]

I don't feel this is a very good article.

IMHO the key to understanding vitamin supplementation is first, to know which are fat-soluble (and will be stored by your body) and which are water-soluble (and will be flushed by your body when you urinate).

So, it is almost impossible to over-dose on Vitamin C, since, your body will easily eliminate anything it doesn't need - C is water-soluble.

This article covers the differences well enough: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10...

I think what drives vitamin taking is a combination of

i) people not fully trusting doctors

ii) knowing that today's food is factory-produced and may be deficient in micro-nutrients like vitamins and minerals

iii) being willing to spend a few dollars per day as an insurance policy; after all, how many drop $5 a day at Starbucks?

[typicalrunt]

In school, I was taught a mnemonic for fat soluble vitamins: DEAK. In other words, you want to "deke" [1] out of the way from these vitamins. You want to watch how much of vitamins D, E, A, K you ingest because they are fat soluble and you can easily overdose on them (unlike vitamin C). It's not a catch-all but it helps when you are taking vitamins.

[1] it's a play on words and a homonym, "deke" comes from hockey where you dodge or fake out an opponent to get around them. It must be the Canadian school system further injecting hockey into our lives. :)

[nagrom]

Then again, there have been several studies [0] that show that many people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in vitamin D and that the deficiency could be the root of serious health problems.

[0] E.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306

[Ras_]

True, for example half of Finns receive less than recommended amount of vitamin D. To combat this dairy and edible fat products have received vitamin D supplements since 2003. For example skimmed milk (the most popular one) would otherwise have very little D because it gets removed in the process along with fat. First you take it out, then put it back in...

[pavel_lishin]

My doctor tells me that I'm low on vitamin D every time I visit and have blood work done. I try to get more sun, but it's kind of hard in New York.

[nodata]

Do you know if the RDA amount is kept up-to-date with current research?

For those of us who want an insurance policy, have you got any recommendations on what multi-vitamins to aim for (a particular brand, maybe that you take?) Are all brands equal?

[fhars]

All brands are equal insofar as you are most likley better off if you avoid them all. For example: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitami...

[001sky]

best insurance policy is to eat proper food. thats not snark, its just true. get a spreadsheet built in excel, and actually model a decent diet for ~7 days. its a very eye-opening experience. you can track calories, fat, carbs, protein and whatever else quite readily with online tools. While resturant food will be excluded (you would need basic recipe or key ingedient lists), soon enough you will understand just how much nutrients are in "real food".

[platz]

Solubility is important but even though vitamin c is soluble, taking too much is quite harmful aggregrated over longer time frames. http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-...

[gabemart]

> even though vitamin c is soluble, taking too much is quite harmful aggregrated over longer time frames

Which statement in that article do you believe supports the position that taking too much vitamin C is "quite harmful"?

[DanBC]

Mega dosing with vitamin C carries some risks.

Here's a report of a tiny old study (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/09/us/taking-too-much-vitamin...)

> 'The vitamin C in supplements mobilizes harmless ferric iron stored in the body and converts it to harmful ferrous iron, which induces damage to the heart and other organs,'' Dr. Herbert said in an interview.

> ''Unlike the vitamin C naturally present in foods like orange juice, vitamin C as a supplement is not an antioxidant,'' Dr. Herbert said. ''It's a redox agent -- an antioxidant in some circumstances and a pro-oxidant in others.''

This was for the relatively small amount of 500mg per day.

I haven't read the Wikipedia references, so maybe they're all trash, but (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C_megadosage#Possible_...)

> Although vitamin C can be well tolerated at doses well above the RDA recommendations, adverse effects can occur at doses above 3 grams per day though overload is unlikely. The common 'threshold' side effect of megadoses is diarrhea. Other possible adverse effects include increased oxalate excretion and kidney stones, increased uric-acid excretion, systemic conditioning ("rebound scurvy"), preoxidant effects, iron overload, reduced absorption of vitamin B12 and copper, increased oxygen demand, and acid erosion of the teeth with chewing ascorbic-acid tablets.[25] In addition, one case has been noted of a woman who had received a kidney transplant followed by high-dose vitamin C and died soon afterwards as a result of calcium oxalate deposits that destroyed her new kidney. Her doctors concluded that high-dose vitamin C therapy should be avoided in patients with renal failure.[26]

And there is an LD50 for rats, although that's 11.9 g per kg. (6 ft adult is 85 kg, that's over a kilogram of vitamin C to reach the same level. That would be 1,000 tablets of 1,000 mg vitamin C.

[Camillo]

> So, it is almost impossible to over-dose on Vitamin C, since, your body will easily eliminate anything it doesn't need - C is water-soluble.

Wait, are you really arguing that it's impossible to have too much of something that is water-soluble? What about sugar? What about salt?

[sp332]

The LD50's for a 100kg person of salt (100g), sugar (1kg) or vitamin C (1.1 kg) are huge. Long-term exposure to sugar can affect your overall health, like causing insulin resistance or just being processed into fat. Salt isn't bad for you, unless you already have a heart or kidney problem. Vitamin C might have some side effects but the evidence is very thin so far.

[judk]

Vitmans and minerals are the easiest thing to supplement in foods, and are everywhere.

Macro nutrients are what processed food loses.

[eru]

What do you mean by macro nutrients?

[rjurney]

He means phytonutrients. Those components of plants that are more complex than protein, carbohydrates or fats and which are known to extend human life by largely unknown processes.

[blazingice]

Usually, when discussing human diet: carbohydrates, fat, and protein. These comprise the energy content of food.

[eru]

Ok, just what I thought. But how does processing destroy them?

[anigbrowl]

That's something you really need to do your own research on, it's a big topic. Start by looking up 'complex carbohydrates' and consider that while they are made up of basic sugars, in nature the breakdown of those complex carbs would be done mostly in the gut rather than through refinement in a sugar plant. A pediatrician friend of mine doesn't even believe in consuming juice, because she considers the body is better able to regulate its sugar intake by processing the fruit and also using the non-nutritious bulk fiber of the fruit to regulate the amount consumed. This is her hunch rather than being proved through exhaustive research, but it seems like a fairly well-informed hunch.

[DanBC]

A glass of juice is a lot of sugar. One serving size of fruit is much smaller, and would give very much less juice. It's very easy to drink a lot of sugar if you're drinking undiluted juice.

Dietitians in the UK recommend that people are cautious with juices and smoothies because of the amount of sugar, and they recommend that people just eat the fruit and drink water. Especially for children, the high sugar and acid is tricky for teeth.

(I agree that the hunch seems reasonable. But then, those are the things that need research, to combat my biases.)

[cko]

Vitamin K is fat-soluble but no upper limit has been established.

[rfnslyr]

Everyone at our office including me are total coffee junkies. We each pitched in a few hundred to get the best possible coffee machines. Before that we'd each be blowing like $40 a day on coffees, always trying new places at lunch, after work, before work, coffee runs to places across the street. It's really a cultural thing at our office.

We'd be sitting and coding for a few hours, and we're all just internally waiting for somebody to utter the magic words "...coffee run?".

At a moments notice we're all out the door, headphones are smashed, phones are flung, chairs are tipped over, papers are in the air!