Vitamins are just one part of healthy life
By HARRY JACKSON JR. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Vitamins.
We hear about them all the time, but how many of us really know what we are putting in our bodies?
Vitamins are actually a group of chemicals that the body needs in very small quantities. Their job is not to actually do anything but rather to help other chemicals do their jobs.
The misconceptions of what vitamins should or shouldn?t be expected to do are rampant, and professionals fear their misuse. Experts are especially nervous about the megadoses available on store shelves. Megadoses of some vitamins can actually be poisonous.
What are vitamins?
Picture a machine that needs 1,000 chains to work. A vitamin would be one tiny link that helps the whole machine work better.
Scientists lettered and then numbered vitamins for reference because their real names often were long and complicated. For example, vitamin B12 is cyanocobalamin.
When several vitamins are under one letter, that means they?re closely related.
Dr. James Shoemaker, a professor and nutritionist with St. Louis University School of Medicine, says vitamins are part of a group of nutrients that the body generally doesn?t make. So you have to eat your vitamins every day.
The human body makes only one vitamin, vitamin D, and that?s with the help of sunlight. But even most of that needs to come from your diet, he says.
Shoemaker says the need to eat vitamins appears to come from the primitive feast-or-famine days of human evolution. The body interprets a lack of vitamins as famine and slows down its metabolism, the chemical processes in your body.
That?s why the American Medical Association recommends vitamin supplements when someone is on a low-calorie or restricted diet. The presence of vitamins helps to keep the metabolism moving.
Two types
For your own safety, know you?re dealing with two types of vitamins:
? Water-soluble: With this type, the body uses what it needs and expels the rest through the kidneys. Your body generally doesn?t store water-soluble vitamins. That?s why you need to resupply them every day through diet.
? Fat-soluble: These vitamins need oil to do their work, so they?re stored in fat cells. That?s why too much of one of these vitamins can be poisonous. The stored vitamins plus the vitamins you take in megadoses can accumulate to poisonous levels.
What you need
Because the body uses vitamins in very tiny amounts, most doctors recommend that you eat a good diet and take a daily multivitamin produced by a reputable manufacturer, says John J. Ponzillo, a critical-care pharmacist at St. John?s Mercy Medical Center.
?The concern I have is you want to make sure you?re getting your vitamins from reputable sources and not out of someone?s trunk,? he said, ?so there?s a guarantee that the products you buy are of adequate potency.?
Vitamins don?t face the same scrutiny as medicines do. Medicines are thoroughly reviewed before they go to market and must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration; supplements are scrutinized only after someone reports a problem, Ponzillo says.
Endorsements
The AMA endorses a daily multivitamin for every adult. But don?t use it as a substitute for a healthful diet, the AMA warns.
John LaRico, owner of a natural-foods store in St. Louis, endorses vitamins because a healthful diet may be harder to get than you?d think.
He believes that foods in conventional grocery stores may be low on nutrients because overcropping has drained the soil of nutrients.
?People just can?t get the nutrients from their food they could 30 or 40 years ago,? he says.
Organically grown food has more nutrients, he says, but until all food is organically grown, vitamin and mineral supplements can pick up the slack.
As medicine?
Many people want to use vitamins as medicine, and that?s often when they end up popping megadoses. For example, people take megadoses of vitamin C to cure or suppress a cold even though there?s no scientific evidence this works.
Doctors recommend the use of megadoses only under the guidance of a physician, who may use them to treat a vitamin deficiency.
?I?m not a big fan of megadoses,? says Ellen Rhinard, assistant professor at St. Louis College of Pharmacy. She advocates getting nutrients from food and a multivitamin.
For example, some years ago people took vitamin E in enormous doses as an antioxidant. Then research found that in megadoses it could cause heart problems and a greater incidence of cancer, especially in smokers and people with diabetes.
?In some cases it can be harmful,? Rhinard says. ?We know a lot about vitamins, but we don?t know everything. We take these huge amounts in isolation, and that?s not the way nature works.?
Finally, there?s another reason she advocates diet as a source of vitamins: ?There are a lot of substances we need that science hasn?t discovered yet. And if your diet is bad, you?re not getting those.?
Source: Times Leader
