what’s the difference between taking multivitamins opposed to eating foods with those vitamins?
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Unfortunately a lot of multivitamins are just filler. The FDA does not regulate vitamins and herbal supplements.
As for if you get a vitamin that has real vitamins as contents. The difference would be the calories and fats.
And of course the enjoyment of eating food as opposed to taking a pill.
Multivitamins don’t contain all the other nutrients present in food and required by your body to survive:
* Protein
* Fat
* Carbohydrates
* Sodium
* Potassium
Etc…
Well some vitamins and nutrients your body needs can only be used by your body after they been processed and turned into a form your body can use. The whole process of either breaking down or converting these nutrients requires a number of different systems and organs of your body to produce things or play an active role in the process. The liver is one and pancreas and your different bile producing organs. And the result is that it takes energy to change these nutrients into a form and quantity that serves a purpose ( making them “bioavailable”) and when u take vitamins, your getting the raw material your body needs. But none of the calories that are needed to do the work it takes to make them bioavailable.
For a normal healthy person no big deal. It may even help burn fat and calories in a limited short term benefit. But if u try to replace your food with vitamins your body will eventually reach a point where it has enough of what its able to get from vitamins alone but knows that it’s short on calories that it needs to operate and will start to just pass the vitamins as waste rather than burn needed energy processing them that could otherwise be used by your brain or muscles to operate and survive.
So yah your body has like this background operating system that kinda monitors everything going on and if it senses something is changing as far as nutritional intake its going to adjust to go into a mode that’s more efficient and focused on self preservation and maintain critical systems. You can go a really long time without eating. Months even as long as your hydrated and have body fat and arent exerting your self physically. I’ve gone 11 days no food only iv liquids in the hospital. I was STARVING and really hangry all the time and even lost 6 lbs over a 24 hr period. But when I got out I was no worse for the wear and even a bit slimmer. Sadly it came right back. Cuz my metabolism had slowed down and it took awhile to speed back up so I was back to my regular weight 2 months later. (Which if you ever are trying to lose weight, is really taxing on your cardiac system and is healthiest to lose weight slowly, by burning fat and calories thru exercise and healthy diet, the most difficult and challenging way of doing it, not by simply fasting and starving the weight off unfortunately)
One simple difference with Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid):
With natural sources of Ascorbic Acid (e.g. fruit) the Vitamin C is found alongside Flavonoids (e.g. Quercetin), which have a beneficial synergy with Vitamin C and improve it’s antioxidant effects.
Flavonoids were determined to not be “essential” and hence they couldn’t be classified as a vitamin (See Vitamin P).
The difference is you can overdose on vitamins from suppliments, but not from vitamins in food.
Generally you don’t need to take additional vitamins if you don’t have a deficit.
For water soluble vitamins, there is no real danger as any excess is simply peed out. So suppliments are just a waste of money in that case.
Fat soluable vitamins are more dangeroes as they stay in your body and as you know reducing fat is not that easy, losing any exces vitamins stored in fat is equally hard.
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