Your body needs vitamins in order to form complex aminos to operate. But your body only needs to make so many of them - especially if you are an adult, not pregnant, or not suffering from a disease of some sort.
The very premise that loading up your body with "excess" vitamins beyond what you need is already pretty fraught. Building a house without enough lumber can lead to long term deficiency - but loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good.
The reality is that the modern diet has already solved so many common nutrient deficiency diseases (pellagra and goiters were a shockingly common diseases 100 years ago) that maxing out on vitamin intake has become more of something like a speculative hobby than anything else.
> loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good
It is almost universally recognized as good to do exactly that. It's better to have one planned extra trip to return excess materials (if they can't be used on the next job) than to have multiple unplanned trips when you unexpectedly run out of this or that.
You mean my DIY projects that result in a dozen trips to Home Depot aren’t optimal :)
Ha. Yeah. Plumbing is the worst for this. I'll buy like twice what I think I need, including some coupling to one size larger and smaller and some larger and smaller pipe. I learned after fixing a well took SIX TRIPS.
(Turns out the line to the gauge was borked, so it never turned off the pump, so the pressure built until it busted my pipes.)
Definitely. I ordered material to replace the balusters on our shared family cabin with horizontal stainless steel cable deck rails and ordered 5-10% extra for all of the various fittings, cable, as well as a backup swage tool.
One of my uncles asked why I’m budgeting for an extra $150 of material we won’t need. I asked him how much it would cost to get us all up here for another weekend to finish if we needed extra parts. The answer was “more than $150” and he understood.
It’s even more crucial to keep enough material on the jobsite when you’re running a project and paying $140 an hour for an electrician.
Most vitamins are a cofactor for enzymes like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine#Biological_functions
Vitamin D is not but rather it regulates calcium and phosphorous metabolism.
While there is no doubt that excess vitamin intakes are useless or even harmful, the problem is that for most vitamins there is a great uncertainty about which are the optimum daily doses, because the controlled experiments that would be needed to determine those doses would be rightly deemed as unethical.
Therefore, since we only have some weak circumstantial evidence, debates about how much vitamin D is good, and the same about other vitamins, will continue. As long as the uncertainty persists, it is safer to ingest somewhat higher doses of vitamins than those recommended, but not many times higher.
The conclusions of the article were that high amounts of vitamin D have been shown to be correlated with good health outcomes, but the supplementation studies could not reproduce the same outcomes, so it remains mysterious what factor was associated with vitamin D in the studies with positive effects and whether vitamin D itself had any role or its presence was just a coincidence.
There would still be a ton of goiters if not for iodized salt, basically an obligatory vitamin intake. People had no good iodine source living inland where most anything they catch or grow is not going to have sufficient iodine no matter what it is they were eating.
I'm not sure what the ancestral iodine source might have been. Fishing villages perhaps along the coast? Hard to say how much coast was relatively populated given challenges of shifting shorelines and archaeological efforts. You can still reproduce laden with a goiter however, and that is enough to keep chucking malnourished humans somewhere on earth.
It takes a pretty extreme iodine deficiency to end up with goiters. In most environments, there's enough in the soil that eating local plants / animals that eat those plants supplies enough.
The iodine deficiency issues that haunted the Swiss (and Appalachia) arose from people settling down from nomadic lifestyles, in mountainous regions that easily were leeched of iodine by rainfall, and then farming that already leeched soil until there wasn't any iodine left at all.
Depends on which vitamin as well. Some like vitamin B and C aren't retained, so excess is shed quickly.
Vitamin D deficiency entered the chat. It's a relatively common issue in many countries.
That's fair, but it also exactly explains why there are weak positive effects of extra Vitamin D.
There's a lot of unknowingly deficient people out there who get benefits from supplements. But the benefits are limited by the upper bound of the deficiency.
Two things to consider: The recommended levels are established based on "good enough for 95% of people". That means that quite a lot of people can get by with less than the recommendation. Furthermore, being deficient is not a binary. If you are just a little bit deficient you may have very mild symptoms.
These days it is same with protein... Too much protein fads.
I think the difference is that increasing protein intake does offset other worse eating habits. So it's not that you need the protein, but there's a small probability that it replaces calories from refined carbohydrates.
Yeah, you do need daily protein but for most people nowhere near as much as they are taking in.
You see these protein bars and some of them basically have a full days worth of the stuff and that is before your other meals come in.
There is the YouTube channel 'Subway takes' where people have about a minute to argue a point of view, usually very funny takes as well. There was one that was 'The Protein fad is basically an eating disorder for men', they aren't far off the mark with that.
>Yeah, you do need daily protein but for most people nowhere near as much as they are taking in.
I don't know, USADA is about as conservative as it gets and they certainly recommend a shitload of protein for for individuals trying to maximize muscle protein synthesis https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/when-consume-protein-m...
>You see these protein bars and some of them basically have a full days worth of the stuff and that is before your other meals come in.
For a 100kg man that would be like 220 grams of protein, must be one big protein bar.
OTOH, at least your username fits ;)
>'The Protein fad is basically an eating disorder for men'
This is such a bad take.
The current protein fad isn't being driven by men. Bros have been hyping protein and keto for over a decade.
The current "put protein in everything" fad was driven by women's social media, especially mom influencers. You're seeing the explosion in products women are more likely to shop for.
My wife started buying protein products after getting a flood of Reels talking up its benefits for children and women's health.
Too much protein can definitely kill you, or at least make you ill, as discovered by the Europeans who explored the northern parts of America and who had initially tried to live from the meat of hunted animals, until they learned from the natives that they must eat enough fat besides the lean meat, in order to survive (most wild animals have little fat, except the bone marrow, which must be extracted).
However, too much protein is a lot, much more than most people will try to eat in normal conditions, because an important advantage of protein is that it is satiating, i.e. when you eat enough protein it is easy to eat less food and more seldom, without feeling hunger.
For example, I eat 2 meals per day, in the morning and in the evening, of about 800 to 1000 kcal each. If I ate more, I would gain weight rapidly.
When I was eating any kind of industrially-processed food, I could not eat so little, because I became hungry quickly. Now I eat only food that I prepare myself, from raw ingredients. In order to avoid hunger, the content of protein and fat is very important. Typically, each of my 2 meals includes 40 to 60 g of protein and 20 to 30 g of vegetable oil. This ensures that I will not be hungry all day.
> Too much protein can definitely kill you, or at least make you ill, as discovered by the Europeans who explored the northern parts of America and who had initially tried to live from the meat of hunted animals, until they learned from the natives that they must eat enough fat besides the lean meat, in order to survive (most wild animals have little fat, except the bone marrow, which must be extracted).
That's an issue of too little fat, not too much protein. The question is whether, when your other nutritional needs are being met, an excess of protein is an issue.
No, it was too much protein, not too little fat, because they had to eat a lot of meat from hunting to provide enough calories, as they did not carry with them enough food containing starch and/or fat that could provide calories from other sources than protein.
It does not matter if most of the calories (i.e. more than two thirds) are provided by carbohydrates or by fat, as long as they are not provided by protein.
Fat was the solution for living far in the north because they did not have plant cultures that could provide carbohydrates.
Both the amount of fat and the amount of carbohydrates eaten in a day can vary in a very wide range without causing health problems, while the protein intake must be in a relatively narrow range to avoid problems. When eating fat with the right composition, i.e. from sources rich in essential fatty acids and in fat-soluble vitamins, something like at most 40 grams per day should be enough, so it is unlikely for someone to suffer from eating too little fat.
Do you have any sources for this? I have also heard of rabbit starvation many times over the years, and it has always been in the context of too taking in too little fat -- essential fatty acids -- as well, due to the extreme leanness of the meat.