Every article I read says you should primarily get your vitamins through fruits and vegetables and other whole foods rather than multivitamin pills. But if you look at the nutritional facts on say, a bag of spinach or cup of fruit, the % daily value seems way lower than a regular multivitamin, and you’d need to eat a ton of fruits/veggies to get a comparable intake (a single serving of spinach is usually almost an entire bag).
What am I missing?
In: Biology
You don’t need to take vitamins at all if you eat a reasonable diet. Recent clinical trials showed no benefit for taking vitamins. Some vitamins people take too much of and it can be harmful rather than help. Unless you are deficient medically, you don’t need to waste money on vitamins.
But to your question. As others have said getting those through food going through the digestion process is better for absorption. Two things come to mind. Some vitamins in food are in a different chemical form sometimes that better allows absorption. For some vitamin and minerals the way they are chemically structured can be less optimal for absorption. Like magnesium for example. You can buy magnesium in the form of magnesium oxide or magnesium glycinate (and several others). Studies have shown the magnesium glycinate has 4 times the bioavailability of magnesium oxide. Meaning if you take equal levels of magnesium in the oxide or glycinate form, you will get more magnesium from the glycinate formulation. A similar thing is at work with food where often the vitamins and minerals in food are in a form that can be better absorbed due to greater bioavailability than the chemical forms found in pills.
The other thing is your gut can only absorb so much of any given vitamin and mineral in a short period of time. Meaning you take a vitamin, all of a sudden a ton of vitamins end up in your gut all at once as it passes through there. But there is a rate at which some of these can be absorbed and anything over that ends up just going in the toilet. Whereas eating food is spread out through the day. Food more or less consistently moving through the gut with a smaller amount of vitamins at a level your gut can absorb it fast enough. The vitamins and minerals keep passing through every time you eat something and your gut can just keep on absorbing what it needs at a pace it is able to absorb it.
As far as the spinach goes, you don’t eat just spinach, you eat a lot of other foods too. And if you eat what is referred to as a healthy diet, you will get all the vitamins and minerals you need from that food and don’t need vitamin supplements unless you are diagnosed with a deficiency and need extra that you can’t get from food. If you look at many vitamins you will see there is farrr more in there than you need. You don’t need that much, and certain vitamins and minerals in very high levels can actually be bad for you. They are overall safe, but some studies have shown high doses of some of these slightly increases risks of damaging organs and tissues in your body (depend on which one we are talking about).
People mistakenly thing “if this normal level of vitamins and minerals is good, taking 100-10,000X more must be better. It is not. At best you are simply wasting money by literally flushing these down the toilet, and some of these at too high levels can risk causing some damage.
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