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Vitamins
misbehavin
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What kind of vitamins do you recommend? I take One-A-Day Men's Formula, largely because it isn't over-saturated with vitamins and minerals, but rather simply has a decent amount to supplement a good diet.
What types (if any) do you guys take?
What types (if any) do you guys take?
misbehavin on
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A friend of mine takes that One-a-Day stuff but even he now questions the need. He eats shit though. Pretty much avoiding anything remotely healthy thinking a vitamin will cover it. He's coming around these days thankfully.
Can vitamin supplements do more harm than good?
There are so many things wrong with that article I don't even know where to begin. They never said why taking vitamins is bad for you, they merely pulled a vague statistic out of their ass to prove a vague hypothesis.
Anyways, I take vitamins, so maybe I'm a little biased.
Albeit alive.
Examples:
Calcium and Magnesium or Vitamin D
...I know there are a heck of a lot more, but I can't seem to find them right now.
I can't imagine taking the One-A-Day pill [only once a day] would harm you though. I've heard some studies suggesting that vitamins and minerals in pill form don't really benefit you at all, but then, I've also heard about some studies promoting the use of such supplements.
I don't take any myself, but I don't really see any harm in taking them, as long as you're not OD-ing (hard to do, though!)
No, I'm talking about a general multivitamin, and specifically one that doesn't exceed 100% daily recommended on any of the ingredients.
I see from my bottle (in front of me now) that a few of the ingredients exceed 100%, but the few that do (there are 4 of them) are water-soluble (according to Wikipedia... God help me!), so it is probably okay.
I dunno. I think it's probably safe, but I'm wondering if I even need it, especially at my age.
I seriously doubt it. Especially considering how good modern diets are. It's the near-pure rice diet, from land that's been heavily farmed for millennia, that people die from.
Well they don't need to show why, and I imagine it's probably such a ridiculously large amount of different pathways and effects it'd take decades/centuries of work. I do however think that more of the people taking supplements were probably ill, which could account for it.
Personally I think taking supplements is likely to do absolutely nothing. I get everything I need from my diet. Now a very thorough examination with specialists/scanners/genetic whatever may identify a few supplements I should take large amounts of to reduce the odds of me getting diseases that I'm predisposed to, but without that advice how would I know what to take? Taking large amounts of everything is at best going to do nothing and at worst going to make me seriously ill.
Can you absorb all your vitamins in one dose? I always thought those one-a-days were rip off because I don't think you can absorb everything you need at once.
They're past date.
Are these bad to take? or just less potent than they use to be?
I've been taking them for a little while, and just noticed that they're about 2 months past their date.
Vitamin C on the other hand, is water soluble and you can slam back as much as you like, and if your body doesn't need it, you'll just piss it out.
The big thing about vitamins though, is a small problem called "co-factors". Co-factors are the other elements that you find in fruits or vegetables that aren't the vitamin themself, but support the absorption of the vitamin in question. These are not found in multi-vitamin pills because no one can really nail down what exact blend works for what exact vitamin, and getting all of the necessary co-factors into place for a pill with 70 different vitamins in it isn't going to be feasible anyhow, now is it.
So what works a lot better is making sure you pay attention to what you're eating, and structure your diet around consuming as many of the vitamins you need as possible in food. When you find you're short on something (say, you're a woman and you're short on iron because you can't get it from red meat the way dudes can), take the pill(s) with food.
Be careful about non-water solubles though, and only take them if you know you actually need them. The water solubles are safe, but remember to take them with food so that you maximize your absorption. In particular, useful pills to take are vitamin C, B6 and B12. They help your immune system and digestion and are safe to take. Also, get some fucking yogurt in your diet if you haven't got any of that in it yet.
And mcp: Just toss them out. It's what, $5 for a new bottle? Versus unknown health risk?
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Ah, that's what they're called.
The USRDA isn't a good way to determine if something contains "too much" of a particular vitamin.
The RDA was arrived at by taking the minimum requirements for being healthy for all types of people (children, pregnant women, etc) and averaging them. So *at best* it's a guide to the minimum you should be consuming, but it's not accurate even in that sense.
I take a general multivitamin from Trader Joes, but mainly in terms of supplements I find the things that are useful are e.g. DMAE and 5-HTP, as well as something with omega-3 in it.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
Certainly if I ever get organised to take anything I'd take something along the lines of cods liver oil, high in omega-whatsits. Proven to actually do things, and not going to hurt (unless you take masses and start spontaneously haemorrhaging). But that's not actually a vitamin...
On the topic of 5-HTP: I bought a bottle of the stuff after hearing about it on here way back when. First time I took it was amazing, I think I actually got a slight buzz too. Lowered appetite, blissful mood, etc. It was like a wonder drug.
Then about a week later it did nothing for me and I eventually stopped trying.
Maybe I was taking too much to start with, I dunno..I followed the directions on the bottle. Think they were 50mg pills and it said to take 1-2 a day.
Placebo effect? The studies that have been carried out on it apparently gave rather larger doses than you used too.
Apparently you shouldn't take it with vitamin B6 as it produces something toxic (according to that most reliable of sources, Wikipedia).
Also, while I realize the recommended percentages are not reflected on what you actually need (being an athletic male, I will need much more), it still says something if you are intaking significantly greater than the recommended DAILY intake in ONE pill of a non water-soluble vitamin.
Also, the only thing I take besides the One-A-Day vitamin is Cod Liver Oil. Good for your immune system and overall skin and hair health.
If I'm training heavily I'll take an additional multi-vitamin, but for the most part I'm with the "get your vitamins from healthy eating" school of thought.
That's a good point. I was surprised in the fall when I found out that if you take the recommended dose of Trader Joe's multivitamin *and* anti-oxidant supplement, you're right at the red line in terms of daily vitamin A consumption, although that's still something like twenty times the RDA.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
No, wrong. Take your vitamins with a meal, ideally one that contains at least a small amount of the vitamins you hope to boost your intake thereof, to benefit from the co-factor effect.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH