I’ve been told that you just pass them through your digestive system like a seed by some and then that they are critical to your health by others.
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Some vitamins, such as vitamin C, your body can only use a certain amount and doesn’t store extra. If your diet is deficient in vitamin C, taking a pill can help, because it will provide all you need, and it won’t hurt, because the extra will just be excreted. Taking a megadose of vitamin C would just be a waste, because your body can only use so much, and taking ten times the regular amount just means more will be excreted.
Most multivitamins have reasonable doses of things that you probably get all you need from your diet, but if something is missing in your diet then the vitamin pill fills that gap and does no harm. Whether the expense is worthwhile to cover the small chance that you’re not getting enough is a decision you need to make yourself.
However, some medications interfere with some vitamins, and in those cases taking a megadose can help. I knew someone who had really bad chapped hands because of a medication she was taking, and her doctor put her on a super-high dose of something, and the problem went away. But that was explicitly on the advice of her doctor, she wasn’t just self-medicating.
Also: your body does store some vitamins, and megadoses of those can eventually make you sick from overdosing. I read a story some years ago about a child who died because of an overdose of vitamin A.
EDIT: /u/foo1235 has pointed out that overdoses of vitamin C can cause kidney stones. Your body will get rid of the excess, but you can overload the systems which do that.
They work. They don’t just “pass through your system like a seed” – that would imply the pill came out whole on the other side. No, the vitamins in there do get absorbed. Whether they always get absorbed optimally, compared to taking those same vitamins as part of whole foods, is a matter of some research and debate and can vary from vitamin to vitamin, and depend on the specific form of the vitamin that is included in a supplement.
If you eat a varied diet then likely they are not critical to your health. Specific groups of people may be at risk for certain nutrient deficiencies, and may be recommended or prescribed specific supplements for those nutrients (e.g. menstruating women have a higher risk of iron deficiency, vegans need to supplement vitamin B12, and so on). Multivitamins are never recommended or prescribed by doctors or nutrition experts, as far as I know, but nor are they likely to do any harm, if used responsibly. Most vitamins are water-soluble and so taking more of them then you need simply results in you peeing them out with no harm done (they get filtered out by your kidneys). Some vitamins (like vitamin A) are fat-soluble, and those can pose a risk when taken in excessive amounts, as they can build up in the liver and reach toxic concentrations. However, again you’re unlikely to approach those levels if you follow the appropriate recommendations & instructions (and most multivitamin supplements don’t contain large doses of these vitamins, precisely for this reason).
If you are worried about your vitamin intake but you’re not sure exactly what vitamins you risk taking too little of, then multivitamins can be a convenient solution that, even if it doesn’t actually help you, most likely won’t hurt either. Just be careful not too take too much, which includes being mindful of other products that you consume that might be fortified with vitamins, like breakfast cereals. And whatever you do, don’t waste money on “vitamin water”. Buy a nice lemonade and take a multivitamin tablet and save yourself a few bucks.
I’d say get a comprehensive blood panel and see where you have deficits that can be addressed with supplements (like Iron, B, D vitamins). Even that is a crap shoot due to absorption levels and so on, but I’d start there. A good complete multivitamin (Centrum, One A Day, Kirkland pill, not gummy) literally costs just pennies a day and will give you broad coverage, so it’s not a bad way to go if you feel your diet is leaving gaps too.
When I was a kid my father listened to an infomercial in the car with me, the sales guy was hawking vitamins in liquid form. Sales guy Said some BS about how his friend owned a porta potty business and the tanks would always be full of undigested pills. I don’t know how to explain that this is nonsense.
Idk I noticed a difference when I started actually taking my vitamins with food aka in the middle of my meal, I don’t pee out almost any of those B vitamins.
It just covers some gaps in your diet, as long as it’s a reputable brand it certainly can help. Humans evolved to eat what was available in a nomadic existence so the concept of 100% Daily Value is a little absurd since we’d go months without certain vitamins and minerals, but also we can do better than just the base line
Like everything else you eat, multivitamins are processed by your digestive system.
There is some debate as to whether vitamins in their processed pill form can be absorbed *as well* as naturally occuring vitamins in food. It may be true that getting your essential micronutrients in a pill is less effective than getting it through normal dietary sources. But even if this is true, the pill still has some effect.
The most common misunderstanding about multivitamins is that most people don’t actually need them. If you have a serious vitamin deficiency, you’ll know it because you’re probably already sick. Minor deficiencies aren’t as easy to detect, but also aren’t as damaging.
Provided you eat a balanced and varied diet with lots of fruits and veggies, you don’t need supplements (unless you have some sort of medical issue that requires them, ofc).
I feel like this just came up recently elsewhere on reddit.
Vitamins don’t just pass through you like a seed. There are variables that can impact how much each one is absorbed, but they are absorbed to some degree just like everything else you eat.
That said – there is no evidence that taking multi-vitamins is beneficial for general health. It is likely that everyone who is otherwise healthy and takes one just because is really just wasting their money – certainly there is no evidence that they are critical to health. They have a place for people who have or are at high risk of vitamin deficiencies, which is not 99% of people who take them.
Your body can’t effectively store all vitamins, that’s why you need to eat healthy every day.
Taking vitamin suppliments can help, if you have a deficiency.
If the vitamin is water soluable, like vitamin C, any excess intake will be peed out and there is no risk.
However, if the vitamin is fat soluable, like vitamin D, any excess will stored within body fat. If you continue to take such vitamins exceeding your daily dosage, you will end up poisoning yourself.
Having a vitamin deficiency can be a serious issue – like between seriously hurting your quality of life to making you irritable and depressed to putting you on death’s doorstep.
Most people get all the vitamins they need from their diet and don’t need vitamin supplements at all. Some people don’t get what they need because of their diet, or need a larger amount due to medical conditions.
For example – I mean this isn’t a vitamin but I had an ex that ate mostly vegetarian and had heavy periods so she was perpetually boarderline iron deficient. That’s where the supplement comes in.
The other most common situation is kids during a growth spurt where the body just used all the resources up.
As people get older especially they start to have health issues, plus, for many people, their food intake starts to narrow in variety. This leads to increased chances they aren’t getting enough of something.
So I think the logic behind multi-vitamins is “better take enough of everything so anything you weren’t already getting is covered”. While the large-dose single vitamin supplements are more for people that are deficient in one particular vitamin which is something you probably needed a doctor to diagnose.
But, to your point, the vitamin industry doesn’t just serve these two groups of people: those that are old and at risk of deficiency and those that have a specific deficiency.
They want to sell as many as possible so they try to convince people it will make you healthier or it will prevent disease (like vitamin c). That’s pretty much bunk – your kidneys do filter out any extra and you end up pissing it out.
If you want to take a multivitamin just to be safe that you aren’t missing anything then go for it. But if you are looking at them as some kind of medicine to make you live longer where more is always better you are probably out of luck unless you actually have a deficiency.
There’s a certain amount of each vitamin that your body needs, and it’s quite possible to get enough of everything from your usual diet.
If your diet is lacking in some vitamins, multivitamins can make up for the difference.
If you take too much of a vitamin, usually, your liver will just filter out the excess and you will pee it out. In that sense if you take multivitamins when you don’t need them, you just pass them, but it’s not “like a seed”: A seed won’t be absorbed by your body at all, while a multivitamin will be absorbed and then filtered out.
It is possible to overdose on multivitamins, since there’s only so much filtering that your body can do in a given period of time.
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