Why are vitamin pills not a replacement for a balanced diet?
In: Biology
Absolutely no macronutrients. You can’t live without protein, carbohydrates, or fat. Vitamins only have micronutrients, and not a very good source of 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.
Just because you put a vitamin or mineral in a pill, does not mean your body will absorb and use it the same way if it was in food. You might require another mineral or substance in the food to actually trigger the absorption of the vitamin your interested in.
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.
ELI5 answer:
A balanced diet includes a lot more than just vitamins. You also need to intake proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, fibres, in addition to vitamins.
There are in fact, meal replacement powder/formula, so you can replace a balanced diet with just formula if you want to. The volume of nutrients is much more than what can be contained in pills (you’ll get either one huge pill the size of an orange or you split that into 50 regular sized pills but that’s annoying to swallow every meal). So the idea of an “all in one” meal replacement exist, it’s usually a bottled drink or a cup of powder that you mix with water, not a pill.
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.
I had a roommate see how long he could go on beer, saltines, and multivitamins. He made it a few days.
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.
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.
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