I've been kind of tired lately and thought I might supplement my diet with multivitamins.
My dad went and bought me some flintstones gummies. But now I'm chuckling to myself. Do these work???
"The only vitamin you should be on is prenatal"
"Vitamins make your pee very expensive"
Unless you are deficient in a vitamin, or have some wierd eating habits (vegans MUST eat only one animal product, B12), multivitamins are useless. Flintstones vitamins or GNCs megadose pack, it doesn't matter. Vitamins are, in general, absorbed by the gut and eliminated in the Urine.
If you bridge upwards into some loose correlation studies, vitamin overload may actually be BAD for you.
Cardiology is doing research in Iron. Now, keep in mind, I don't believe this myself (the evidence is shotty and there are plenty of other reasons for this), but there are researchers working on this right now. Supplementing iron in the diet for someone who is NOT iron deficient increases cardiovascular risk. IN short, they site that iron is part of the plaque, accelerated in iron overload syndromes, and people who get phlebotomy (blood donors) have less cardiovascular risk.
Hematologists have done some correlation studies between folate in a postmenopausal female INCREASING the risk for breast cancer. Folate may be protective of colon cancer, but INCREASES the risk of recurrence of colon cancer. I forget which one it was, but we've got a Prostate guy who was saying one vitamin increased risk of prostate cancer.
Bottom line Opal, by taking flintstones vitamins you to do things. (1) Make your pee really expensive, and (2) Move your chance of prostate cancer from 0.000% to 0.001% (there have been two documented cases of prostate cancer in females in the United States, apparently).
Of course, they are tasty and all of this is probably nonsense. Take them if they make you feel better, but they aren't doing anything for you
