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
Short answer is there really isn’t a difference. Others have mentioned the concept of absorption, properly called Bioavailability, but that’s already been taken into account formulating the multivitamin. If you look on the label that’s why certain vitamins are included at say 599% of the daily requirement, because only 1/6th gets absorbed.
The “eat healthy” stuff is more about the big picture balance of fats/carbs/protein and picking up excess calories. e.g. you snack on a 120 calorie apple vs a 240 calorie bag of cookies.
Reality is that nutrient deficiencies are rare in the United States since about a hundred years ago when we figured out what vitamins were. Since then we’ve “fortified” or “enriched” most of our basic foodstuffs so that even a “shitty diet” easily covers the basis. Restrictive Vegan diets are about the only ones with a serious chance of missing anything.
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