Why are vitamin pills not a replacement for a balanced diet?
In: Biology
The body is a very complex thing. Over hundreds of years, man has discovered many things about the body, but not near everything. There are things about the liver, for instance, that nobody has any clue about how it functions, let alone, the best inputs. There are certain chemicals that only come from plants, and. in natural form have huge variations. A vitamin includes within it only what the designers want to be in it. We don’t even know every chemical or variants of compounds the body needs. We do, however, know that this body evolved or was created to eat the things naturally available around us. I know it sounds like a non-answer answer, however, the first step in science is knowing you don’t know.. the second step is observing. We’re not anywhere near discovering what all is needed in the human body to function optimally, but science has already told us that natural selection designed a body to work best with the things already in our environment and available to us.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/survive-without-eating-382-days/
>In 1965 a ‘grossly obese’ man survived without eating for 1 year and 17 days. He lived entirely off his copious body fat and vitamins, and ended up losing 125kg [276 lb] of weight with no adverse effects.
(Standard disclaimer)
Nutrition scientists–I guess that is the word for them–say that we really don’t know everything that is nutritionally required by our bodies. Our guts are inhabited by trillions of bacteria, and we more or less exist because we feed them, and they create nutrients for us. No liquid diet or manufactured pill can substitute for the thousands of foods we can send to those critters. Think of all the varieties of fruits, veggies, grains, and animal proteins we humans eat. Scientists haven’t been able to break all these foods down into every possible nutritional substance in these foods, to figure out exactly what nourishes our bodies. Plus, culturally, humans eat different foods all over the earth. We seem to do well on such a wide range of foods, that about all we know for sure is that we need a good mix of them. Some mixes work better for some individuals than others. Vitamins minimally cover the bases–we hope. But there’s probably a thousand more nutrients we don’t know about yet.
The thing with vitamins vs a balanced diet is that we don’t know everything that our body needs. We have a broad idea, hence the “essential vitamins and minerals” label, but there’s trace minerals and stuff in foods that we don’t completely understand. So while you can live on processed food and pills, you won’t thrive, and you will become bogged down with multiple illnesses.
Your presumption is false. Vitamin pills are absolutely a replacement for the vitamin deficiencies that come with an unbalanced diet.
The problem is that 1) certain vitamins may be harder to absorb in pill form vs from foods and 2) an unbalanced diet has more problems than vitamin deficiencies. For example, weight gain/loss, dyslipidemia, and a whole host of diet dependent diseases.
Think of vitamins as a carpenter, the rest of the food as lumber, and your body as a home in need of maintenance and repair. It would be useless having a carpenter working with warped and mouldy wood. It would be useless having a thousand carpenters but no wood.
The word “vitamin” comes from “vita-” (“life”) and “min” (“little”). It was coined to describe chemicals discovered by scientists that humans need in order to live, even though we don’t need a large quantity of it.
There are many other substances we need in much larger quantities to survive, called “[macronutrients](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient#Macronutrients)”. We get those from food. They are mainly carbohydrates (“sugars”), proteins (which our digestive system breaks down into the amino acids we need), and fat. We also need a decent amount of water even though it doesn’t technically provide nutritional content.
You could make a “vitamin” pill that also contained all the macronutrients we needed, but it would be a hell of a lot bigger than a little pill you could swallow. We make this stuff in a number of forms. It’s essentially what people on liquid diets surive on.
I had a roommate see how long he could go on beer, saltines, and multivitamins. He made it a few days.
People honestly don’t know the answer. For example, we don’t have any requirements for types of protein (yea, there are recommended amounts, but you don’t need protein), but we do have essential amino acid requirements (which we normally get from protein). In livestock, it’s known that you can use crystalline amino acids (supplemental) to provide the same amount of AA as protein from corn/soy, but the corn/soy fed animals grow better. Something about having actual protein, not just AA, stimulates better growth.
That’s just one example. Other people are saying “real food” has polyphenols and antioxidants and shit, which I don’t buy. Vits A, C, and E are all antioxidants. Maybe those “bioactive” components have some other function, but there is no “requirement” or “need” for them.
Our bodies aren’t as good at taking in man-made vitamins. Often we need other ingredients that are in the foods that we eat. Only eating the man-mafe vitamins does not provide the same benefits as a balanced diet. However medical companies sell liquid diets for people with feeding tubes. You can engineer supplements to replace food, but only as a last resort. Eat normal food.
Latest Answers