Why are vitamin pills not a replacement for a balanced diet?
In: Biology
Some people who can’t eat may be on enteral feeds (tube feeding), which essentially means they meet all their nutrition needs (carbs, fat, protein, vitamins, minerals) from a nutritional supplement drink/formula. Sometimes people can’t eat but also can’t be tube fed, so they require parenteral nutrition (IV nutrition). This basically means carbs, fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals are infused directly into their bloodstream. So yes, it is possible to live off of nutrition “supplements” – not necessarily vitamin pills like you asked about, but formulas and specially made mixtures.
For those of us who can eat, we also know that there are health benefits to eating “real” food that you can’t get from supplements. For example, eating a well-balanced diet will also provide fibre and phytonutrients, such as antioxidants. There is a lot that we still don’t understand about the thousands of compounds we find in fruits and vegetables beyond just vitamins and minerals, but we know that we don’t get the same health benefits when we isolate these compounds in pill form, compared to eating food as a whole with all the components they contain.
And let’s not forget that food isn’t just about nutrition! Eating foods that are satisfying to us and enjoying meals is also good for our health 🙂
Another aspect to this is we don’t really know what nutrients are needed to maintain health.
If you wanted a “pill” for fat, it would just be a spoon full of lard.
The required quantities of various nutrients are more than would fit in a pill.
What we eat can affect the way in which the nutrients of those things are absorbed. This means that the same amount of vitamins eaten are often absorbed more efficiently when eaten as part of food, compared to when eaten just in pure pill form.
Another aspect of this is the fact that vitamins can be dangerous in high quantities. It’s usually recommended to prioritise a balanced diet over supplements because you need to eat every day anyway (so you may as well make it balanced) and because you can’t easily account for the vitamins in what you eat. If your diet is unbalanced, you may already be getting too much of a particular vitamin, but still be taking multivitamins for convenience, which would mean you always had too much of that particular vitamin in you. Depending on the vitamin that can cause various issues, but beta-carotene for example has been linked to increased risk of lung cancer.
If vitamin pills only contain vitamins like I’m led to believe, then it’s not enough nutrients. You need carbonhydrates, proteines, fats and such to survive. If you eat all of these in moderation, everything should be alright ( unless I’m misunderstanding the question, which is very likely).
Vitamin pills are fine but you still need fibre, protein, carbs and good fats etc which pills are unlikely to provide so pills alone cannot sustain you
Because we don’t fully understand exactly what the human body needs, and why. Nutritional science is still in its early days. We have an understanding on how to avoid death, but full quality of health is not as well understood.
Also, they contain no energy.
Full vitamin and mineral replacement with pills would mean a lot of different pills being taken at different times, all day long.
Your teeth would eventually go soft and deteriorate out from lack of use.
You would likely build up toxins in your intestines with them being used but without fibre, as well as making them prone to both bacterial and fungal infection.
Your stomach would shrink and your gallbladder would stop working properly, so if you did eat (which you would still have the desire to) you would feel sick and uncomfortable.
I could go on.
Vitamins don’t provide energy while macronutrients like carbohydrates, fat, and protein do. Also, when we’re talking about how a well-balanced diet contributes to wellness, vitamins are only one part of the equation (albeit a very important one). There are other things like fiber, minerals, zoochemicals (found in animal products), and phytochemicals (found in plants and vegetables) that contribute to wellness. Another interesting aspect of wellness is how our gut microbiome (an ecosystem of microorganisms living in our gut) plays a role. The microbiome affects immune system function, appetite control, mental health, and various other physiological processes. It’s a very hot field of research right now and a lot is being figured out, but to put it short, vitamin pills alone don’t really “feed” our microbiome. A healthy, well-balanced diet does in such a way that the benefits the aforementioned physiological processes.
[The guy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling) who helped popularize vitamin supplements was a Nobel prize winner, he thought vitamin C would help cure cancer and he could live forever. Needless to say he’s dead. And smart people are rarely always smart all the time.
Your body processes natural food better. A lot of those vitamins you excrete the nutrients.
They still help 🙂
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