Why are some vitamins sometimes listed as 1500% of your RDI? and wouldn’t that be damaging to your body?
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Nah, properly functioning kidneys will filter out anything that isn’t needed. For the most part, you’ll just have expensive pee.
For the majority of them, no. But some vitamins are toxic in high doses. Like eating polar bear liver can cause hypervitamintosis a. An overdose of vitamin a. Which can result in vomiting, hair loss, bone damage, and death.
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Where I live, at least, vitamins are not regulated in the same way that medicines are. This means the manufacturers don’t even have to warn the buyer of any potential risks.
Vitamin toxicity is a real risk if you are taking excessive doses. At best, if you have a healthy diet and are not deficient in vitamins, taking a supplement has no benefit. In most cases, you’re wasting your money.
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Fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamin E, are dangerous in large amounts because your body will store them. If you get too much of these, you can get sick.
Some vitamins are water soluble, so your body can just throw whatever it doesn’t need into your pee, and you pee it out. Vitamin C is a good example of this! You can have as much vitamin C as you like and it won’t be a problem, you’ll just pee it out.
So if something has more than your recommended daily intake of a vitamin, it’s probably a water soluble vitamin and won’t be a problem at all.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I’m not a health professional and can’t speak to your individual situation.
It depends on which vitamins and minerals you’re talking about. A lot of vitamins are water soluble. That means that your body will only absorb and use what it needs and the rest will get eliminated with the rest of your regular bodily waste in 24 hours or less. The family of “B” vitamins are the best example of this. Most B vitamins are eliminated through your urine and when you take more than you need, they turn your urine bright yellow and may have an increased odor to them.
Other vitamins are fat soluble and your body will hold on to them for far longer. Vitamin A, D, and E are three that I know of with Vitamin A being toxic at high levels. This is why polar bear liver is toxic to humans because polar bears store massive amounts of Vitamin A in their livers. Eating just a small amount of polar bear liver is enough to introduce toxicity. That being said, Beta Carotene is less toxic and readily converted to Vitamin A as needed so it’s generally seen as “safer”.
Minerals are also generally water soluble, but some minerals can cause problems in high doses. A common mineral that can be a problem is Iron. In high doses, it can cause constipation. Getting too much calcium can lead to kidney stones.
In the end, if you’re going to take a supplement that has a high dose of a particular vitamin or mineral, check with your doctor to be sure.
It’s not necessarily harmful. While it’s true that some vitamins can be very toxic, most are tolerated pretty well at high amounts. Particularly, the water soluble ones are removed from your body VERY rapidly if there’s too much.
Throwing large amounts of vitamins unnecessarily makes the pills sell better. People think that vitamins are good, so more vitamins must be better. They buy the pills with the biggest numbers.
The minimum daily requirement is not the same as the optimum dose for good health. For instance, consuming no vitamin-C will give you the disease “scurvy”, and the minimum daily dose will keep scurvy away, but…for optimum health, you must take much more than that.
In fact, if you are an adult and you are a little sick, take a 500mg pill every four hours that you are awake (sleeping 8 hours). I think FDA says 90mg a day is enough to keep scurvy away? Even when I am not sick, I take 500mg twice a day.
In general your body can tolerate more vitamins and minerals then it needs. While humans require a supply of ascorbic acid and can’t synthesize it, meaning they will die without it, they only need a relatively small amount and can eat foods very rich in it without health problems, getting more then ten times the requirement won’t bother a human.
A lot of vitamins and trace minerals are like this. Unless you make some very strange and unwise dietary choices you will never need to worry about too much zinc.
Edit: Supplements can easily be unwise and dangerous diet choices. Make sure to research any vitamins you take to make sure they aren’t going to have bad effects with your diet and body’s requirements.
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