Why are vitamin pills not a replacement for a balanced diet?
In: Biology
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.
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